nathreed

dick applebaum said:

I just posted another question to the  FDB forums, Asking whether ARM support is planned.

https://forums.foundationdb.org/c/development/fdb-core

FDB's core implementation is based on an Ordered Key-Value Pair -- basically an Ordered Dictionary.  macOS, iOS and most OSes do not support an Ordered Dictionary.

FWIW, A while back, I was experimenting with iOS Swift Playgrounds and was able to approximate what FDB did with their Ordered Key-Value Pair.


If FDB/Swift/ARM is viable, it opens up many opportunities, e.g. small business Point-Of-Sale-Terminals (iPads) WiFi connected to a FDB transaction server (cluster) running in the back room on a Mac Mini or an iPad while simultaneously running other clusters in the cloud.

This could really be a game changer.

There are a couple things wrong with this. First off, an ordered dictionary/key-value pair is a data structure, not something that needs to be supported on an OS level. You can write one on whatever OS or in whatever language you like. 

Second, this doesn’t really enable any new applications. Businesses could already use iPads connected to something like a MySQL (a database that’s been around for a long time and has APIs in nearly every language under the sun) server. Or, more likely, a cloud service that integrates payment processing and inventory management. 

Third, you could probably run this on an ARM server if you wanted to, as long as the server is running Linux. A quick look at the git repo shows that they’ve got it all set up with Docker containers. You don’t need “ARM support” to be able to interact with it from an ARM based device like an iPad - how do you think iCloud works now? All you need are the language bindings for the language that you’re using to program that ARM device. 

This is just another database that happens to be good for massively distributed applications (like iCloud). It’s really not applicable to the small business like you suggested. 

Apple Coherency? Do you mean "Continuity"?