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Comment by jonwinstanley | Hacker News Reader

What are the issues you see? My team all use Docker with M1 Macs and all seems to work fine, if a little slow.

It's always the shared volumes that kill you. Especially for I/O intensive stuff like npm and webpack builds.

With that said if you're doing mostly backend stuff in Go/Python/Ruby etc it's quite good. Most of my complaints are from full-stack development.

If you're on Mac, have you tried the VirtioFS shared volume implementation yet? It was under experimental features until recently and you need macOS 12.5 to enable them, but it's very noticeably faster for I/O intensive stuff (my webpack builds are still 2x slower than native, but I wouldn't call it utterly unusable anymore)...

Why do you use docker to build local stuff?

Our team has pipelines that builds, runs, and tests our code in containers. We like to approximate this locally with docker compose. This helps eliminate things like forgetting to update pyproject.toml. Additionally, since the pipeline uses an internal artifactory/harbor (no external Internet), the containers we use have environment variables using the internal resources.

Good question: we actually decided to just not do this for local "statics". But having everything containerized makes it easier to attach editor contexts, work in the same environment as your CI/CD system etc.

The other upside of being fully containerized - even for FE stuff - is that you side-step having to worry about having any sort of "local" dev environment configured beyond Docker/Podman/etc and some environment variables set. It makes onboarding new developers a breeze and eliminates "Weird, works locally on my machine!" types of issues.

Ruby takes forever to start the application because it has to open all the files. 4-8 minutes IIRC before the first test would run in our Rails monolith on my M1 pro.

My experience: it’s fine when using docker to run applications; painfully slow for a containerized development environments that want to share the file system with the host.

Lots to do to combat this, like: not sharing the volume with the host (vscode dev containers recommends this)

Qemu segfaults when compiling

Sounds like a Qemu problem?

Docker Desktop uses QEMU when building an x86 container on an M-series mac.

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