Hacker News Reader

Comment by capableweb | Hacker News Reader

Rather than switching hardware, you can also switch out the software to more efficient one. esbuild would make your builds go sub-ms even without needing a M1 CPU, also worth a try if you cannot switch to the newest hardware, so I guess this comment is for poor people.

View on HN

Why not both? I can honestly say that I didn't know how bad the 2019 MBP Intel CPUs are until I tried a M1. It's streets ahead.

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.

> Why not both?

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?

> 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.

> because I run my own OpenStreetMap server on it.

What do you do with it?

Generate map tiles, throw lots of queries at a local Overpass API, run custom large-scale analysis, develop a geocoding service, serve routing calculations... Many applications that public servers will let one query at sample scales, but for which serious use requires setting up one's own servers.

I'm mainly generating map tiles for offline use. I don't want to hit OSM official servers, this is too intensive (and they would probably block me).

Whatever they want. It's theirs.

Cool.

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.

I am still on an i5 11" MacBook Air made of aluminum from Mid 2012 with 4GB RAM. Changed the battery twice, upgraded to a larger SSD once. I was considering buying a new laptop a few years ago, but that thing has served me so well despite falling to the ground unprotected about 3 times and being old. I do embedded and some web programming. I will use it until I am no longer able to start it up. And at that point, I will probably open it up and have a very last try at fixing it.

If you're not streets ahead then you're streets behind.

Unfortunately, ESbuild is not a drop-in replacement for Webpack either. So, the poor but lucky enough to rely on any plug-ins.

Wouldn’t you need to change your entire build processes if you followed this route? I don’t do a lot of this type of dev but my understanding is esbuild wouldn't handle polyfill, for example.

esbuild is not simply “more efficient webpack” so that’s quite misleading.

Good thing I never said esbuild is "simply" "more efficient webpack". Parent was talking about build times, probably bulk of that is spent building JS, which you can plug in esbuild to handle instead.

ESBuild doesn't polyfill, so it's _really_ not a decent replacement, unless you want to keep track of which JS object features are available in which targets and import those manually yourself?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com