Re: Have we become too Intel x64 centered?

From: Niall Douglas (s_sourceforge_at_[hidden])
Date: 2021-01-24 00:21:48

On 23/01/2021 17:48, Peter Dimov via Boost wrote:

> Github Actions is very usable and covers the common cases (gcc-4.7 to 
> -10, clang 3.5 to 11, msvc 14.1 and 14.2, macos-10.15) so Travis can be 
> used only for the rest 
> (https://travis-ci.org/github/boostorg/core/builds/755272662).
> 
> To enable Github Actions for your repo, just copy e.g. 
> https://github.com/boostorg/core/blob/develop/.github/workflows/ci.yml 
> into the same directory. No other steps are needed.

Github Actions is a convenience wrap of Azure Pipelines. You can use 
Azure Pipelines directly if you wish.

Azure Pipelines is free for open source projects and it comes with 
runners for:

- Windows Server 2019 x86/x64/ARM/ARM64
- Windows Server 2016 x86/x64/ARM/ARM64
- Ubuntu 20.04 x86/x64/ARM/ARM64
- Ubuntu 18.04 x64
- Ubuntu 16.04 x64
- Mac OS X 10.14 x64
- Mac OS X 10.15 x64

It's a bit more work to write up all the integration scripting over GA, 
but you definitely have the above architectures available for free of 
cost for CI. There are Github Actions apps which will template the 
integration with Azure Pipelines for you.

I would be very surprised if ARM runners for Github Actions don't appear 
at some point relatively soon, but for now, my project CI simply invokes 
the ARM cross compiler to ensure all my code builds and links correctly 
for ARM Linux, but does not currently run the unit tests for ARM.

I would also mention that if your project is in vcpkg (Boost is), then 
it gets compiled by Azure Pipelines for almost all of the above 
platforms. That isn't running the unit tests of course, but it's better 
than nothing.

Niall