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If adopting Rust means buying new hardware, then they will just keeping using their existing options regarding programming languages.
This reads as a dismissal. That you can only be a serious developer if you have a permanent setup where you sit down, and don't move from it.
Many devs are not just sitting at a desk or cubical writing code.
They may need to interact with clients, move between locations, even across cities. They may even be in the horrifying hot desk situation.
In all of those, working with a laptop makes sense.
A dual core laptop with 2GB of RAM is a very serious computer, it's a supercomputer compared to what I had 20 years ago for doing essentially the same tasks.
Slow software is not the machines fault.
How does a single laptop core compare to a single core of the fastest workstation money can buy? It's the same silicon with a touch higher power budget. Unless you time it, the difference is imperceptible.
A large rust project should be split into multiple crates. It makes the code much cleaner, flexible and compiles faster.
A stronger machine absolutely makes a difference. Single thread performance of a desktop compared to a laptop also does.
What desktop are you comparing to what laptop? The top end i9 has eight cores, and a max turbo just 100mhz shy of the top end desktop part. The turbo is less aggressive on the laptop, but there's just not that much difference between them for low thread counts.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Intel_Core_i9_micropro...
I wasn't really intending to get in to an argument about whether rustc threads well, because although I've used Rust a fair bit I haven't built any large projects in it. If people have and it uses all their cores, I totally believe them.
What I was trying to do is point out that the correct response to "Rust doesn't thread well" is not "but have you run it on a workstation?". Laptop chips for the first time are extremely competitive for single threaded workloads, because the individual cores in large chips now have equivalent power budgets, you just get a bunch more of them.
"Actually, it does thread well" is totally fine as a response, and I'm not going to claim otherwise.
Compiling multiple crates at the same time is very common in my project.
There will definitely be workloads that benefit from the new cache hierarchy, but there are also those that suffer.
If you've measured it on a high end laptop for comparison then, of course, the proof is in the pudding and I'm not going to argue (or if you see >~10 threads in use that's proof enough).
I think the 5 GHz i9 with fast desktop memory (hardly a big investment for a company paying programmer salaries) would absolutely demolish the average laptop CPU with slower memory and bus speed. Yes, even in single thread; probably factor of 2+.
Moreover, even though parallelism is limited in this case, it surely will use more than one thread, and in other cases it's less limited and you still have this real issue to confront: why pay more for a slower system? Seriously, what are the overriding considerations?
The fastest laptop chips are extremely fast at executing lightly threaded programs. I'd own a workstation if it sped up my tools. But it won't.
Because it's something you can absolutely do to improve your computing life with a simple, rational calculation, which I will outline now for expensive (relative to US hardware prices) Germany.
PC dev box parts, prices sourced from geizhals.de:
* Ryzen 9 3900x, 490 euros: https://geizhals.de/amd-ryzen-9-3900x-100-100000023box-a2064...
* Top end X570 mobo, 200 euros: https://geizhals.de/gigabyte-x570-aorus-elite-a2078208.html
* 32 GB DDR4-3200, 144 euros: https://geizhals.de/g-skill-ripjaws-v-schwarz-dimm-kit-16gb-...
It's missing other stuff, but those can be quite cheap and don't need upgrading as often, and you maybe don't need the fanciest motherboard. (Going with Intel at this point is a complicated topic due to security issues and mitigation performance hits, to be balanced against having the most obscenely fast performance possible for a bit more money.)
Anyway, let's call it ~2k euros for a truly badass 12c24t 32GB memory dev box.
Compare this to, say, the common and much-loved Macbook Pro: that's 1.5k to 3.2k euros (just checked). The former for a super weak computer, the latter is 2.3 GHz 8c(16t?), 16 GB 2666 MHz memory. That's really weak computing power for the amount you're spending (yes, I understand you're not buying pure performance, but that's what's being compared here), and you don't even really "want to do better" with higher clocks etc because, speaking in purely physical terms, you need more volume and cooling to get the higher throughput. Laptops also start to throttle way sooner than computers with big coolers (that needn't cost much- I'm using a 15 euro cooler on my i7 8700k at 4.7 GHz which is passive without significant load).
So that's it really; for about the price of a weak Macbook Pro, you could have an ultra powerful dev or build box. You can get some really amazing screens for little money these days, and re-use it between upgrades, along with several other components; how much of your laptop do you usually re-use when upgrading?
I've now spent a truly excessive amount of time justifying my point of view, in the hope that I don't sound completely delusional. 1.5-2k euros once every few years for your developers to have peak dev performance is IMO an easy sell; if your laptop is a thin client you can have it additionally and it won't need upgrading for ages, because it doesn't need to do any heavy lifting.
> They're different markets.
False dichotomy, they can be (and usually are) additive, because you can rdesktop and use remote CI. What I'm questioning is the relevance of laptops as primary build computers.
Just look at the CPU usage on a >= 16 cores machine while building the rust compiler itself. The only time all cores are used, essentially, is while building LLVM.
I absolutely disagree. The mental overhead and time it takes to synchronize my work over multiple machines stands in no comparison to the few thousand dollars I'd save every few years by having desktop computers everywhere. If compilation is slow, use a distributed compiler infrastructure (if your language supports this, mostly writing C++ here).
If you are doing serious work, do it in the cloud. If you have an actually big codebase to compile, you need to scale that horizontally anyway and an expensive workstation under your desk will take hours anyway.
In some sense I think we agree, except the cloud is just someone else's powerful computer. Laptop as thin client via rdesktop is how I developed (also C++) for years, but only when I was at home away from my work computer. With the cloud you're always away from your work computer.
> If you have an actually big codebase to compile, you need to scale that horizontally anyway and an expensive workstation under your desk will take hours anyway.
Agreed, and that's further along the same vector: if you have performance issues with compilation, consider also (not only, before someone jumps on me) using bigger machine(s) for the job.
Anyway, I'm going to stop here. Feels like I found the most hated tech opinion ever... at least eventually there were some thought-out replies (and thank you for yours).
Speaking of mobility, a 9980HK in a laptop is basically the same as a 9900KS for a lightly-threaded workload like (apparently) rustc. You might be able to reduce compile time by increasing fan speed, though.