ARM Macs and Virtualization: It's going to be great

The scripting environment managers have made big improvements in the past few years. Nvm/virtualenv/rvm give me 90% of the docker value prop with none of the performance impact or debug hassle.

Haskell/clojure/java all seem platform agnostic out of the box.

C/C++ is probably still a hassle with libs being platform specific.

Microsoft pretty much killed Linux on desktop for anything other than ideological reasons at this point.

Because being stationary isn't that great for creativity and problem solving.

Additionally, there are whole careers being made on the ability to work while on the move.

It shouldn't take much understanding - many people work almost exclusively in those environments. Consultants, customer engineers, 'digital nomads'.

Then there's the group of us who would rather the (frankly epic) advances in hardware went towards actual visible software performance improvements instead of more layers of waste.

And even when not traveling, we are expected to move across the building and join other teams for collaborative work.

I know most devs are hesitant to try anything that's "always online", but remote development apps have really gotten better recently. VSCode with the Remote extension makes doing development on a VPS a breeze, and unless you have a really bad internet connection, you probably won't even notice it's remote. And then you also get the benefits of the VPS having a faster internet connection (faster package downloads, etc), most likely better specs than your laptop for only $10-15/mo, more resiliency, and better security. It also completely solves the whole "my laptop is ARM but my servers are x86" problem that keeps getting talked about.

Because a lot of development requires only a couple cores, maybe 8GB of RAM, and a few free GB for the database or dataset (at most, probably a few hundred free MB). If you aren't simulating large networks, doing serious number crunching (HPC-styled or ML), or into graphics heavy development, a laptop is more than enough for most work.

I want to say most, but that's an assumption on my part, but a lot of computing is about encoding business rules that could be done by passing paper around an office or larger complex and making it digital (though obviously not with the speed and reliability that's often wanted or needed). Message passing, filtering, connecting to databases, verifying data integrity, connecting multiple DBs and auto populating them, etc. None of that requires a powerful computer to develop.

Even the embedded work I've done is really just business rules for safety critical systems: If this reaches some temp, send a signal to the pilot, pilot can optionally release halon. If pilot sends "release halon", then release the halon. Nothing about that or the target platform (16MHz processor with memory measured in KB, maybe double-digit MB) required a powerful computer for development considering that the earlier versions were written on, maybe, 386s.

Just because you do things that require lots of RAM, disk space, and fast cores don't assume everyone else needs that. I used to do a lot of graphics work, and the laptop barely did the job. A full tower was what I needed (especially as I wanted to use CUDA and/or OpenCL and move a lot of numeric work associated with it to the GPU). If I were doing machine learning I'd be in that same boat. But I'm not, most of us aren't.

Docker and Compose look pretty straightforward in comparison, at least for local development.

How is it for the docker-compose 'I need x, y, z running' use case? It's not something I need that much, there are various shell.nix hacks I've seen to (e.g.) get Postgres running for Elixir development. They work, but it's not as rich an approach as the rest of Nix.

What if your laptop is arm but your production environment is x86 ?

You might think "well i'll have arm containers on my laptop and x86 containers in production" but then it means that dev and prod diverge: you're running different software, that might have different behaviors.

One of the core ideas of docker was that you could have ideally the same artifact both in developmend, testing, staging, qa and prod environments.

There's little way around the core problem: mac os x badly suited for running docker containers. The most performant way to run docker containers is to run them in native gnu/linux (hence: gnu/linux laptops)

Before AWS, I didn't expect Amazon to become the power that it is with regards to cloud either.

Perhaps Apple can provide some unique attributes of cloud infrastructure that's specifically useful to people who otherwise operate within their ecosystem, without feeling like they need to compete with Amazon/Google/MS in every aspect.

[1] https://perspectives.mvdirona.com/2015/10/arm-server-market/

It's about Rosetta... on Apple Silicon: "Rosetta is a translation process that allows users to run apps that contain x86_64 instructions on Apple silicon."

The original post pre-supposes that you're going to be able to run x86 VMs on Apple Silicon Macs. You can't: "Rosetta doesn’t translate the following executables [...] Virtual Machine apps that virtualize x86_64 computer platforms"