Comment by whynotminot | Hacker News Reader

Comment by whynotminot | Hacker News Reader

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Heh, I'm in the 2020 MBP group. But I still think these M1 Macs--as awesome as they undoubtedly are--are not quite yet ready for developers. Virtualization support still looks iffy, and while I really don't care much whether my container is Arm or x86, the ecosystems and tooling around those architectures are still at different levels of maturity.

The exciting (or depressing, for the 2020 crew) thing is that the fact that these M1 Macs are such a triumph probably does mean that these various rough edges will be smoothed out way faster than even I, a self admitted Apple fan, expected them to be.

I was thinking I'd be waiting until 2022 or 2023 before being ready as a developer to have my primary device be an Apple Silicon laptop. But with the overwhelming success of these chips, every developer wants to be on these things ASAP. I could easily see the ecosystem for Arm being radically improved over the next year.

I've been pushing my virtualization to cloud providers or my in-home VM beast anyway, so that didn't matter to me.

What did make me faster though is compiling Rust is now soooooo much faster that it flies. I've been building some toy projects and the edit, compile, test cycle is now shortened so much that I find myself enjoying hacking on my projects more because there is no dead time while the compiler does its thing.

That alone is hugely important.

webpack is also faster, as is a lot of other things that don't require virtualization or docker. I bought the 13" MacBook Pro M1 to supplement and use occasionally alongside my 2017 MacBook Pro 15", but I find myself not having touched my 2017 MacBook Pro at all because I keep grabbing the 13" MacBook Pro.

It's incredibly fast, and the battery life is amazing, which allows me to not worry about where my charger is, or whether I am comfortable on the couch and damnit now I need to get up and plug in.

I bought my MBP for personal projects, in which I don't use Docker or any other virtualization-based tooling and I could live with 16GB RAM. I expect the kinks with things like Brew to be worked out in a matter of weeks. So I think these would do fine for my purposes

Brew is claiming otherwise.

https://github.com/Homebrew/brew/issues/7857

I've had more success using MacPorts (https://macports.org). About 80% of what I've tried has worked. Most things that don't work, you can download source and build it yourself. Autoconf, automake, cmake, pkg-config etc work via MacPorts.

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