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Comment by Shank | Hacker News Reader

Don't get me wrong. I love the potential native performance gains from this transition, but I can't help but just be a tiny bit scared for the future of my day to day work.

For better or for worse, my company uses Docker for Mac for the vast majority of the stack that I don't work on but need to actively develop. I'm already paying a huge VM cost and it's pretty terrible. I don't see Apple working on any kind of native containerization solution. Does that mean that I'm going to be eating the current VM cost + x86_64 virtualization cost in the future?

I really want to keep using macOS as a platform. I know I can just stay on the hardware I have, but it's not really practical to be on an end of life architecture. It seems just a tad shortsighted to ditch x86_64 when a lot of people depend on it specifically because it's a shared architecture with other platforms.

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> I don't see Apple working on any kind of native containerization solution.

It's a shame really. Apple doesn't do containers. They don't do virtualization. They don't do open source. It's all sort of like the jackling house [1]

It would be SO cool to do FROM macos:10.9 in a native mac dockerfile.

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jackling_House

(don't do = don't do in a direct committed way)

I've given up on the dream of working in a place where I can still run "all the things" on my laptop, at least in a place that has embraced cloud services, Kubernetes, micro services, etc.

Yep. We're hanging ourselves with all this crap. There has to be a better way.

VSCode has an SSH extension that lets you seamlessly work on a remote server, this has been invaluable with my old dual-core Macbook first offloading docker and my work to a vultr.com virtual machine and then a 6-core Intel NUC on my local network, which just feels like using the same computer.

The only drawback I've found is I use "puppeteer" a lot which is an API for programmatically using Chrome and Firefox, sometimes I want to see what's going on.

Yes that’s the IDE I use as well with WSL2 on windows 10. Weird that windows turned out to be the best Linux distribution I have used.

Ive got an 8 core Ryzen 3700x desktop with 32G of RAM and I can bring that to its knees easily. It’s ridiculous.

You're a bit RAM starved at only 32 GB.

My preferred environment is yours, inverted. Native Linux (likely Ubuntu 20) with Windows in a VM as necessary. That is making much better use of hardware IMO. It also gives you native Docker, and a ton of easily obtainable software. Much new software development is beginning in Linux or Linux-like environments, including most language development.

Perhaps more importantly, Linux is the deployment target for most cloud based software. The company I work with (Fortune 100) uses Linux as the preferred deployment platform simply due to cost, along with sufficient quality. It's nice to develop, test and deploy all on the same infrastructure.

Software turns out to be very interesting in terms of real lifecycle. Here in 2020, COBOL skills are in (relatively) high demand! While I'm interested to see the "Son of Unix", based on something like Rust and completely cleaned up, rationalized, and secured, Linux and Linux skills will be valuable for decades longer. Windows, I'm not so sure about...

My next development system will likely be a 16/32 core/thread AMD chip. I'd hate to hobble it with the Windows kernel, it's really not aimed at that class system. Linux is.

nix is pretty great for decoupling the build process from the deployment format, and it gives most of the advantages of containerization without the penalty (on Macs, at least) of running a VM.

> It seems just a tad shortsighted to ditch x86_64 when a lot of people depend on it specifically because it's a shared architecture with other platforms.

It would probably be shortsighted to do absolutely what you say.

The longsighted game is that they don’t see x86_64 as the long term future so they might as well eat the migration now.

I wouldn’t think you’d have to pay double in the long run because you would be virtualizing arm containers.

If anything having a major platform completely switch to arm would be a boon for cross platform support. Something has to bring it into the mainstream and it might as well be the company that gets devs to move mountains for them.

> I don't see Apple working on any kind of native containerization solution.

You don't see Apple's solution to a problem which doesn't exist yet on an architecture they haven't announced. Nor do I. I'm not sure why you'd expect to see anything at this point.

> It seems just a tad shortsighted to ditch x86_64 when a lot of people depend on it specifically because it's a shared architecture with other platforms.

A lot of people are interested in how Apple is going to tackle this issue. There are a lot of ways they might address this issue and reverse compatibility. While Bloomberg has been very forthcoming about rumors like this one, they haven't had much in the way of information about how Apple is actually planning on transitioning here.

Apple has done this twice successfully already so it'll be interesting to see how they tackle this. So talking about whether their unknown solution to this issue is a bit premature.

> It seems just a tad shortsighted to ditch x86_64 when a lot of people depend on it specifically because it's a shared architecture with other platforms.

What exactly depends on x64? Hypervisors? JITs? I can't think of that many examples.

The most important software already runs on ARM, because ARM is a really important platform.

Sure, adding yet another platform (macos-aarch64) to everything is going to be some work and some things will fall by the wayside.

It'll still happen for the most part because you know there will be a significant installed base. That's something that other companies (like Microsoft) can't pull off.

Might also be interesting targeting ARM SERVERS. E.g run ARM containers natively.

With Thunderbolt couldn’t you have external coprocessors?

Leave it to Apple to make the CPU a dongle.

Why wouldn't you just build your docker images targeting Arm instead of x86?

ARM doesn’t really have better performance though.

They should just buy AMD or something.

AMD’s x86 license isn’t transferable

Wait, even if the company is wholly bought?

What if I as a private citizen just decided to buy a majority stake in AMD? Is that different than a corporation doing the same?

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