Technology

Have you used ARM servers? They’re a massive pain to work with because they just need that one little extra step every time.

Yes I've had that experience and a similar one once the first ARM SBCs came to the market circa 2009 with the SheevaPlug. At that time was trying to get stuff work on those and I know how things go.

when you actually need performance, Javascript needs to go. Java and dotnet have the same cross platform advantages with much higher speeds.

After this point you're essentially saying the same thing I was BUT replacing the word Javascript with Java/dotnet. Once those virtual machines runs well on ARM (as they mostly do) developers won't care anymore about the architecture. I only picked Javascript/Typescript as an example because it will most like take over everything in a few years.

That’s part of the reason why companies like Oracle are handing out free ARM VPS products with tons of free RAM, to convince people to try their ARM product for real.

And why are they trying to push developers into ARM? It is medium term strategic investment, they're just waiting and pushing ARM manufacturers such as Ampere Computing to develop "bigger and better" CPUs that will take on Intel. Once they're very competitive in performance they'll simply start replacing Intel with ARM and nobody will complain because at that point the 90% of developers are using Java/dotnet/Javascript (things that run on VMs) will not even notice the difference between running on their amd64 or ARM.

There’s no benefit to running ARM servers. Running slow software like PHP and Javascript becomes especially problematic on slower hardware, so for those cross platform runtimes, you’re still better off running on amd64

It seems that Facebook, the holy grail of running PHP, doesn't agree with you. They've been pushing ARM on their datacenters for years now.