Opened a discussion about zlib, a venerable compression library
that is not yet optimized for arm64. There is work underway to
reanimate the project (which has been dormant for some time) to
incorporate optimizations from companies like Arm. One of the sticky
points is CI infrastructure to support all appropriate platforms.
http://madler.net/pipermail/zlib-devel_madler.net/2019-December/003308.html
Inquiring into the state of python, especially the availability
of binary aarch64 "wheels" to allow for more rapid installations of
python packages via pip. There is an existing infrastructure for
binary wheels for Python for 32-bit Arm called "piwheels" supported
by the Raspberry Pi Foundation, but there's no 64-bit support in that
collection.
A project is underway to correct several numerical operations in Python so that a set of numerical and scientific computing libraries (scipy, numpy, pandas) all pass all of their tests.
https://twitter.com/siddhesh_p/status/1206043359829057536 numpy/numpy#14886
One notable blocker for arm64 support for wheels is several libraries maintained by Google, where requests to add support (in this case for the communciations library grpc) are rebuffed.
Noted an Amazon contribution for php to improve the speed of several
string-handling operations, which has largely been merged into PHP 7.4.
https://twitter.com/_msw_/status/1205636311341645824
Go 1.14 beta 1 now has support for FreeBSD on arm64. The patches have all been merged and all tests pass. Go 1.14 release is due in February 2020, the beta is available now for testing.