I thought this was worth sharing with the wider community; in 2024, ARM64 free CI runners were released for Github Actions in beta for Organisations. As of this week, this is now available for personal accounts (Such as Laurent's itself, as Joplin isn't an "organisation" on Github!) and effectively, anybodies! (Caveat: These aren't yet available for private repositories).
There's a pretty heavy amount of Joplin users relying on ARM64 in some capacity, whether on the traditionally better supported M-Series Macbooks, or running server on Raspberry Pi's, which has traditionally meant having to work with some awkward tooling such as QEMU emulation via e.g., DockerX. Having real ARM64 processors to use means these situations can be treated as native targets with the new runners, which simplifies things a lot.
For example, I've just made the runners start building the ARM64 release of the joplin-desktop snap and it seems to have gone just fine, which is a huge win for myself because that processor architecture so far has resulted in having to have a completely separate building environment that's been difficult to inspect and broke literally this week, again, so thanks for the convenient timing Microsoft.
Interestingly I was expecting a bigger performance gap, but there's basically a negligible difference in execution time. (Initial tests prior to including Rust in order to support the OneNote Converter were actually giving a small win to ARM64 consistently!)
Github Blog:
