system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
Downsides to programming on M1 Macs as a new CS student?

I'm on the hunt for a laptop that will last me at least the next 3 years through my computer science degree and came across the new M1 Macbook Air which seems to tick a lot of boxes for me (great design, amazing displays, great sound quality, fast, power efficient). As for price, considering a 512GB SSD and 16GB ram configuration for the M1 Air would be the equivalent of a base model 11th gen Intel Dell XPS with 8GB ram and 256GB SSD or a base 10th gen Intel Surface Laptop 3 with 8GB Ram and 256GB of storage, this seems like quite a neat price for what a lot of people recommend spec-wise. However, I'm a little skeptical of the fact that its running on arm processors. After doing a little research, I've come across a few questions:

1. Does code written on arm devices like the M1 need to be run through a cross-compiler to work on x86 computers, does it depend on the language? Looking through the course outline we'll be doing some python, java, C and SQL.
2. Will the lack of ability to boot into Windows / Linux be something that could shoot me in the foot in the future? 
3. Other than the lack of native apps, is there anything I should be aware of that would make getting an M1 Air/arm device in general a bad decision for programming?
gpt
I wouldn't. Aside from the potential lack of support for apps, there will likely be a lack of support for any libraries you may use.

There is effectively no documentation or support existing for these brand new machines. You'll be making an already hard degree that much more difficult.