On 10/05/12 10:18, deadalnix wrote:

Le 10/05/2012 06:35, Nick Sabalausky a écrit :

Really? ARM servers? This is the first I've heard of it. (Intel must be
crapping themselves.)

ARM is more energy efficient than x86 . This is a more and more serious
alternative for datacenters.

Yea, it's in the process of arriving now but is surely going to be a very big deal -- lower energy consumption, lower heat production (= more densely packed datacentres), cheaper individual nodes ...

See e.g.:
http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-15540910
https://www.pcworld.com/article/249988/hp_to_make_arm_servers_available_for_testing_in_q2.html
http://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2012/01/arm-servers-lca/

When you also factor in that within a year you're likely to be seeing full desktop solutions running off ARM-based phone/tablet devices [see e.g. http://www.ubuntu.com/devices/android ] it should be apparent that ARM is a very important target for D.

To me, that's a reason as compelling as the licensing issues (if not more so) why the reference D compiler might want to switch to an alternative backend.