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Comment by cassianoleal | Hacker News Reader

Of course. Any time you try to run a non-ARM binary on an ARM CPU without some form of translation or emulation, it will fail.

This is also true for any other CPU architecture.

If you want to know about specific compatibility issues, I'm happy to try to help as I've been using an M1 Air as my daily driver for many months now.

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> without some form of translation or emulation

IIRC that's why Rosetta2 exists. The question is more whether there are issues despite that

I don't think I've ever had an issue related to Rosetta2. Everything I had to run on it worked flawlessly and without any noticeable performance hit.

This is only my own anecdote though.

I also had everything working fine but performance is really bad when you go through rosetta.

For example, discord client is still x86 and while it works without any issues, the heaviness is noticeable.

Also, .NET 5 does not have an arm build (.NET 6 does but it is still in beta). The entire toolchain works but compiling a binary can be 3-4 times slower on the emulated one.

Things work without any issues though. They are just slow.

I don’t notice many performance differences comparing GUI apps. Discord’s PTB is M1 optimized and, guess what: It’s just as shit.

PTB still shows up as Intel binary: https://cln.sh/5KA9Vh

I was running the main ruby on rails app I work on via Rosetta since the first M1 MacBooks came out. The performance hit was there for sure, but not huge. Running local tests or seeding my database ranged to "about the same" to 10-20% slower than my 10 core iMac Pro, which is still a pretty fast machine.

Since I've upgraded the app to support Arm natively, almost everything runs faster on the m1 13" macbook compared to my 10 core iMac, with the exception of long running tasks that will use all the cores you can throw at them.

There have been some font rendering issues in Ultimaker Cura (which is written in Python) that ran as x86 on M1. These have been resolved in the Python library.

In fairness, I've seen font rendering in Cura on Linux as well.

I've seen font rendering issues in Cura on Intel Macs as well. Cura's GUI and UX are pretty bad in general IMO though, so I don't use it.

Did they finally get Docker working on the M1 chips?

Yes. https://docs.docker.com/desktop/mac/apple-silicon/

Native ARM containers work but there are various things that break with Docker x86 emulation, eg with Node.

Mostly. Docker for Mac's internal VM consistently kernel panics the first time I launch it after a reboot. I also have containers freeze up every now and then, something that never happened on my Intel machine.

Docker works mostly fine. ARM images are pretty common, and for those that don't have it, it runs a QEMU emulated x86 machine.

I have hit issues with it but they're rare enough that I don't care.

It’s somewhat unreliable and file system interaction is slow, but from what I’ve heard that means it’s no different from x86 Docker Desktop.

Docker has been working for months.

You’re missing the point, it’s an ecosystem question. I personally don’t experience many issues at all. If I do they’re usually solved by switching to Rosetta (but that does introduce some hairiness for command line stuff).

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