[tsmi]

People argue over these minimal differences for good reasons.

If <insert objective measurement> = binary size, and I'm buying ROM in volume to hold that binary, +10% ROM address space can easily cost more than the ARM license.

That can matter quite a lot for adoption. Especially in the short term.

Obviously, priorities differ and change as a function of time but as the saying goes, the only thing worse than making a decision with benchmarks is making a decision without benchmarks.

[brucehoult]

In 64 bit land, RISC-V has consistently the smallest code size. RV64GC, not even using the new things in the B extension that will make code smaller again.

Some data from Ubuntu 21.10 for amd64, arm64, and riscv64:

https://www.reddit.com/r/RISCV/comments/tik718/addressing_cr...

[tsmi]

I only brought up the binary size thing to give a concrete example based off the article and the parent's comment. I am totally sure the situation is fluid and changing.

My high level point is: changes in "objective measurement" have costs in the same way that license, governance and ecosystem have costs. And "objective measurement" can easily overwhelm the others, especially at scale, and therefore they should not be dismissed as unimportant.