Technology

Okay... that's fair, but "your run-of-the-mill code monkey" that writes JS is the majority of the market nowadays and it will only grow more.

I think people underestimate the challenges involved when building software systems tightly coupled to the underlying hardware (like if you are a team tasked with building a next gen server).

Successful companies in the space don't underestimate it though, the engineers who do the work don't underestimate it, and Linus doesn't underestimate it either.

The domain knowledge in your org required to mitigate the business risk isn't trivial. The value proposition always needs to be pretty juicy to overcome the inertia present caused by institutional familiarity. Like, can we save a few million on silicon? Sure. Do we think we understand the challenges well enough to keep our hardware release schedules without taking shortcuts that will result in reputational impact? Do we think we have the right people in place to oversee the switch?

Over and over again, it comes back to "is it worth it", and it's much more complex of a question to offer than just picking the cheaper chips.

I imagine at this point there is probably a metric fuckton of enterprise software what strictly dictate that it must be run on X86. Even if it doesn't have to. If you stray from the vendor hardware requirements, bullshit or not, you'll lose your support. There is likely friction on some consumer segments as well on the uptake.

dog knows who's ARM implementation

Big cloud provides will take the opportunity to move to ARM as it is cheaper for them.

The cloud isn't a literal empheral cloud. It's still a physical thing with physical devices physically linked. Physical ram on physical slots with physical buses and physical chips (not just CPUs, many other ICs are in those machines too). The complexity of the demands of the arrangement and linkages of that physical hardware is incredible.

Nobody is out there writing enterprise server firmware in java. How can you have a java VM when the underlying compents of the physical device don't have the necessary code to offer the services required by the VM to run?

To be incredibly blunt, and I don't say this to be rude, your questions and assertions are incredibly ignorant. So much so that it's essentially nonsense. It's like asking "why do we still even have water when we have monster energy drink?" It demonstrates such a fundamental misunderstanding of the premise that it's honestly difficult to even know where to begin explaining how faulty the line of thinking even is.

Linus isn't talking about JS developers at all. Even a little bit. I promise you, you would not enjoy hearing his unfiltered thoughts on JS developers.

He's talking about the professional engineers who design, build, and write firmware for enterprise grade servers. There no overlap between JS coders and these engineers.