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Comment by RKearney | Hacker News Reader

Yes, that’s exactly what the linked article mentions

  > If your application is written in a scripting language,
  > odds are that you can simply move it over to an A1 instance
  > and run it as-is. If your application compiles down to
  > native code, you will need to rebuild it on an A1 instance.

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Heh, "rebuild it _on_"

They're clearly putting a hundred-mile moat between them and cross-compilation from the start :D

I wonder what their support stance will be when confronted with customer cross-compile scenarios.

Might just be "figure it out for yourself".

I doubt it's that hard if you're using a language with a reasonable cross-compile toolchain. That will probably influence choice of technology for new things aimed at this kind of performance envelope.

No doubt a lot of existing software will be left out by cross-compilation being too much of a pain.

I can confirm that cross-compiling for aarch64 should work without hiccups.

Golang has really nice cross compilation features, it's as easy as setting two environment variables `GOOS` and `GOARCH` when building.

If you use a modern gitops CI/CD type workflow building containers automatically then you don't need to worry about the manual building part either - this can be done cleanly with automation

I don’t think it is a moat, just stating the simple case.

I’ve spent a lot of time making cross-compile work for complicated builds. It can be tedious and frustrating fighting compilers and build systems to get it right.

Sometimes it is necessary because the target didn’t have a complete native toolchain, but other times because the target was just so incredibly slow for large builds.

I haven’t built anything with them, but these Arm servers appear to be neither of those two cases.

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