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While switching architectures is non-trivial at the application layer, it's not as bad as you make it sound. Especially once the application has been "broken loose" from its original platform of development. Areas where you might expect trouble are apps that use highly-optimized or machine-specific code for various purposes (audio and video codecs spring to mind, Microsoft Excel is another example actually since it uses an optimized calculation engine), and apps that do complex multi-threading (using exotic synchronization). It's a bigger deal when going for 32 to 64-bit architectures.
Aside from these cases, it really is just a recompile away and some testing and a few targetted bugfixes at issues which were never problems on previous architectures. Switching OSes is a far bigger deal.




Member since:
2011-02-10
Recompiling applications to be compatible to specific hardware arch is not a simple thing, and even then, it is almost equivalent to re-writing the application from scratch. The only advantage is that you already have the application logic. You have to consider your target's environment, existing dev libraries, IDEs and support that depends on your application requirements.
That is why, Win8 for Arm will still years to become an accepted platform for developers, methinks.