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Comment by PointyFluff | Hacker News Reader

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Developing for a single platform in 2025 is like developing for a single platform in 2005, if you don’t care about mobile.

The desktop marketshare of the various platforms hasn’t fundamentally shifted since then. Mobile was all additive, and Microsoft lost it. But Mac and Linux remain roughly where they were.

I believe, that the GP comment is too dismissive, but it is true. In 2005 when the dominance of IE started to dissolve it was not the best move to develop for a single browser. Though people still did it.

Today we see a rise of ARM on desktops, developing for x86 excludes Mac users, but the situation moves in a direction when exclusive x86 software will exclude an assortment of users of different OSes who chose to buy ARM desktop/laptop.

But I completely understand the choice made by the author, to use vector extensions on two (or three? RISC-V?) processors would be a much more additional work. The project is FOSS so anyone can jump in and add support for ARM vector extensions. Hopefully it will be easier then to write it from scratch, because you can compare intermediate results bit to bit, and catch mistakes red handed.

This chart indicates lots of growth for OSx since at least 2009 (as their data goes back to).

https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/desktop/worldwide...

Would be interesting if they took out enterprise and/or computers were forced to use rather than chose to purchase.

Not everything is a VC funded thing. This is clearly a research project at a university - notice the ff.cuni.cz links in the images.

It's mff.cuni.cz. ff.cuni.cz is faculty of philosophy, mff is faculty of math and physics :)

Paraphrasing somebody: Win32 is the most stable Linux API.

Unironically, true.

As one of your sibling comments points out: it works perfectly on Wine.

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