After upgrading our app's dependency chain to run native arm64 builds (which took a bit of googling) webpack's incremental build time on our app is down to 116ms from 983ms on my 2016 Macbook Pro. Over 8x faster.
Our Tensorflow.js (webgl) models that previously ran about 8fps in the browser are now running at the camera's native 30fps framerate. (Similar to my desktop 2080ti.)
I think I want to just use this machine fresh and just move a few files over as needed.
(FWIW, my WindowServer usage is generally around 3-8% when idling and I am losing about 6% an hour at the moment.)
So glad I went with the spec I did, all the power I need with room to grow.
There was a bug where something would infinite loop on a non-standard resolution, think that was fixed.
I don't think people will be moving away from webpack for awhile, but transpilation is often a very expensive part, and `swc` is very near to stable, and as a transpiler / polyfilling tool it's pretty fast.
Because buying new stuff is wasteful and only a temporary solution to the problem?
Look, I like nice, fast machine as much as the rest of the crowd here, but let's not kid ourselves. In a years time the software we run on it will have become even more bloated and things will be just as slow as they were. And then a new machine comes out we all want to buy that.
There will be some ecstatic blog posts again. Which is weird, I think. Needing a faster machine for you daily work should feel like defeat for a developer.
If you need a new laptop and can afford it, by all means go ahead and indulge. In the mean time, I am typing this from a 7 year old Latitude that I use every day for software development and that shows no sign of aging, apart from some scratches. And each time I read a post like this I wonder: what do these people _do_ with these machines?
To give you an idea, I don't have Macs, but I have a beefy desktop because I run my own OpenStreetMap server on it.
My old machine: i7 3770, 32GB ram, 1 TB sata SSD: 3 days to import Europe's map. The new one: Ryzen 5800, 32GB ram, 1 TB NVME: 10 hours to import Europe's map.
I will probably need to upgrade my ram and NVME capacity if I want to build a world map.
What do you do with it?
Enjoy your latitude, but you don’t have the right to tell me that I can’t enjoy my M1 max.
Different strokes for different folks.
Would you mind sharing your research results?
I am getting one soon and I am in progress of drafting notes for stuff like migration & setup.
We were still on node 12 because, until recently, Google Cloud Functions didn’t support anything newer. But when I installed it, I noticed it was running on x86 via Rosetta. So I upgraded to the latest node (17) which installed as native arm64.
Almost everything “just worked” but there were build errors with installing: webpack, node-sass, gprc, and node-canvas.
Webpack turned out to be an issue with node current (17) so downgrading to lts (which is currently 16) worked.
That seems to have magically fixed the gprc build too.
We weren't actually using node-sass anymore; so removed that dependency.
Upgrading node-canvas to 2.8.0 and building from source (after installing its dependencies via homebrew) seems to have worked.
All in all it took maybe 2 hours to follow all the rabbit holes. And our whole engineering team is going to move over to arm64 as soon as Apple can deliver their machines.