@geerlingguy I'm still a bit disgruntled that PowerPC and OpenFirmware on CHRP didn't take off.
If Apple pulled something Rhapsody-like out earlier and Microsoft had kept a PPC release into Windows 2000, I think maybe we would have seen enough inertia to have PPC chips get the investment and development they deserved. We'd be in a different world today, I think.
@DarcMoughty @geerlingguy
Big Endian PowerPC machines could still be alive and kicking with Linux had Google not given up on the architecture, phasing it out in Go (you can have Go 1.10 with gccgo, but that isn't much by today's standards) and in V8 (and consequently Node.js), LLVM on PowerPC is often buggy so your mileage with Rust may vary. All in all lots of modern software simply can't be built 😩
I was working on our CHRP design at Umax back in the day (yes, PowerPC assembly, OpenFirmware were great—by the way, Dr Ting, RIP, was working on our OF system… if you are into forth, you know he was a rock star), too much was hanging on Apple, they were making too many decisions (yes, they were driving Mot´s 88000 and IBM POWER into this space, but still)…
I wonder if an OpenPower org taking a RISC-V approach a long time ago would have worked better.
@m0xee Here's where I point out that POWER9 is still mixed-endian and you can run a Talos II or Blackbird in big-endian... if you really want to. The only real concern there is graphics, nothing newer than an HD 6990.