Re: Have we become too Intel x64 centered?

From: Edward Diener (eldiener_at_[hidden])
Date: 2021-01-25 07:24:11

On 1/24/2021 3:25 PM, René Ferdinand Rivera Morell via Boost wrote:
> On Sun, Jan 24, 2021 at 8:24 AM Niall Douglas via Boost <
> boost_at_[hidden]> wrote:
> 
>> On 24/01/2021 09:44, John Maddock via Boost wrote:
>>
>>>> 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
>>>
>>> Even with the help of a famous-web-search-engine I couldn't find that
>>> information anywhere on the Azure website... just saying.
>>
>> It was composed by me from multiple sources, including personal
>> experience of programming GA and submitting pull requests for AP-based
>> CI open source projects.
>>
> 
> What Niall failed to mention is that the ARM architectures are not for
> Microsoft hosted agents. Here's what the very minimal docs <
> https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/devops/release-notes/2020/sprint-171-update#additional-agent-platform-arm64>
> says about it:
> 
> You can now run your self-hosted agents on Linux/ARM64. We added
>> Linux/ARM64 to the list of supported platforms for the Azure Pipelines
>> agent. Although the code changes were minimal, a lot of behind-the-scenes
>> work had to be completed first, and we're excited to announce its release!
>>
> 
> For Microsoft hosted agents, which is what most of us are interested in,
> you only get x64 (not even pure x86). As Sam Darwin referenced in his blog
> post I have an always in-progress CI test bed for C++ that people can use
> to get started with various cloud CI providers <
> https://github.com/bfgroup/ci_playground>. I'll see if I can find non-x64
> support in something out there (other than Travis).

How does this compare with Boost CI 
https://github.com/boostorg/boost-ci. I am utterly confused by all the 
CI stuff for Boost and am really tired of spending time worrying about 
it all. If there were some common solution for all Boost libraries which 
was really easy to use I would use it but all that I see is that all 
this CI stuff takes a large amount of time to understand and I would 
rather spend time programming than time trying to decipher CI testing 
for a Boost library.