doc: initial draft of cross-platform section

[mhdawson]

No description provided.

[jimlindeman]

I wonder if this is confusing Operating System platform (Linux, MacOS, Windows, iOS, Android) with architecture platform (amd64, arm64, ppc64le, etc). Be aware that nodejs code can be independent of both of those parameters, but Dockerfiles will be specific to a single OS, but can then be built against multiple cpu platforms.

For example, a RedHat UBI9 container for a nodejs application can be built for arm64 (M1 Macs) and amd64 (aka x86_64), with the same Dockerfile as input. Note, the docker architecture then allows definition of a manifest layer that then redirects the appropriate architecture platform image to be downloaded based on the client architecture. That is why a FROM in a Dockerfile doesn't have to specify the architecture platform, like "FROM registry.access.redhat.com/ubi9/nodejs-20:latest".

[lholmquist]

I wonder if this is confusing Operating System platform (Linux, MacOS, Windows, iOS, Android) with architecture platform (amd64, arm64, ppc64le, etc). Be aware that nodejs code can be independent of both of those parameters, but Dockerfiles will be specific to a single OS, but can then be built against multiple cpu platforms.

My understanding is that since this repo is more front-end related, that we would be discussing the platforms that a user interacts with, like iOS/Androind/Web and not necessarily the architecture, which we could/should probably discuss in the node.js reference architecture, if we haven't already