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Comment by volta83 | Hacker News Reader

Works is step 0.

Works efficiently is step 10000.

x86 is at step 10000, ARM at step 5000, power is at step 0.

Firefox "worked" before this post on power. Now somebody put enough effort to actually make it usable.

The fact that you don't see people complaining about Firefox PowerPC performance on Linux is not because performance was good - it was unusably slow - but because nobody uses Firefox on Power.

Think about what that means. Think about how many bugs in Firefox are reported _every day_ for x86 and ARM, and how many are reported for PowerPC. Is that also because the PowerPC version has no bugs? (no, it is because nobody uses it, nobody reports them, and nobody fixes them).

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> x86 is at step 10000, ARM at step 5000, power is at step 0.

I agree with your general point, but I do believe that Power is the most "practical" ISA after x86 and ARM - albeit it's a distant third, it's definitely not at 0. It has the full support of a bunch of mainstream distros, public container registries have a decent amount of support for their images, and people actually run pretty serious workloads on Linux on Power.

Power does have a lot of niche backing, albeit it's continuously being hurt by IBM's total lack of interest in doing anything but push it beyond the billion dollar contracts they're milking with it. That's totally destroying any mindshare Power has. There's really no way to get a cloud shell on a modern Power machine, or physical access to a modern one without forking over thousands of dollars for the privilege (the latter only really is possible due to Talos' amazing efforts, bless em).

At one of the OpenPOWER summits they referred to the Raptor workstations as the "low end systems." I laughed and then I cried.

I think i agree with what you say, however, an important detail is that any given bug (known or not) has pretty low odds to be architecture specific.

Afaik this article is a big deal because it's JIT, so a big chunk of architecture specific code to get good performance. But most code is not going to be that.

That's not to say that architecture specific bugs will not exist. But i think your outlook on this is a little pessimistic.

Well, ahem, somebody does try to fix them, and we do get reports which get triaged (I know this, because I've done a number of the fixes, some of which were not trivial). There are much fewer of them, which I think is your point, but there aren't none, and there isn't nobody who cares. I think you're overplaying your hand here.

If the implication is that POWER is somehow new, I first used it when it was RS/6000 and introduced FMA. There was subsequently a rather large installation at my lab. Firefox without the JIT is only a problem with the "modern" web, and I default to turning off Javascript anyway, and I guess someone uses it to make it worth porting.

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