Great article ! This is the kind of content I always hope to find on HN's front page.
I really wonder how things are organized at Apple to allow for vertical integration to work so well. That feature alone must have involved so many people from so many different teams.
As noted in the article, Apple solved this problem six years ago by simply adding an x86-compatible memory ordering mode to their chip when x86 emulation became important. Yet another way Apple's chips lead the industry.
Well well well “modeless” has decided to finally see the light of modes
And as noted in the article, while that helps a lot with most of the issues, there are some corner-cases they still don't handle.
For reference , Fex is a translation framework for x86 to ARM much like Apple’s Rosetta2 and Microsoft’s Prism.
Valve sponsor development as it’s also the way the new Steam Frame supports x86 games. It’s also being used (as a fork) in Crossover Beta to replace the use of Rosetta2.
Why doesnt Stream require their binaries to be compiled to some bytecode and transpiled during the install ?
THen they wouldnt require any emulator for any new compiles.
I don't know, but assumed that Valve doesn't require studios to recompile their software or use any special tooling, it's basically just packaging of existing executables. This is also why they do Windows on Linux emulation.
> Why doesnt Stream require their binaries to be compiled to some bytecode and transpiled during the install ?
They still have to support the entire back-catalog. It's not reasonable to expect thousands of existing games to port to ARM
because there's no gaming-oriented toolchain for it
Existing games will not be recompiled for the new bytecode target, and they want all of those games to work regardless.
Several games in their library are actually just game updater/launcher binaries, which manage their associated game assets and binaries externally.