Comment by freedomben | Hacker News Reader

Comment by freedomben | Hacker News Reader

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Interestingly enough, the trend I am seeing is all the MacBook engineers moving back to native development environments. Basically, no longer using docker. And just as expected, developers are getting bad with docker and are finding it harder to use. They are getting more and more reliant on devops help or to lean on the team member who is on Linux to handle all of that stuff. We were on a really great path for a while there in development where we were getting closer to the ideal of having development more closely resemble production, and to have developers understand the operations tools. Now we're cruising firmly in the opposite direction because of this Apple switch to arm. Mainly it wouldn't bother me so much if people would recognize that they are rationalizing because they like the computers, but they don't. They just try to defend logically a decision they made emotionally. I do it too, every human does, but a little recognition would be nice.

It's not even a problem with MacBooks as such. They are still excellent consumer devices (non-casual gaming aside). It's this weird positioning of them as the ultimate dev laptop that causes so many problems, IMO.

Why would excellent machine be blamed for shitty software?

Because machines are tools meant to perform tasks, and part of that is being interoperable with other tools and de facto standards in the relevant field. For dev work, today, MacBook is not good at it.

Remember, though, that the binaries deployed in production environments are not being built locally on individual developer machines, but rather in the cloud, as reproducible builds securely deployed from the cloud to the cloud.

Modern language tooling (Go, Rust et al) allows one to build and test on any architecture, and the native macOS virtualization (https://developer.apple.com/documentation/virtualization) provides remarkably better performance compared to Docker (which is a better explanation for its fading from daily use).

Your "trend" may, in fact, not actually reflect the reality of how cloud development works at scale.

And I don't know a single macOS developer that "lean(s) on the team member who is on Linux" to leverage tools that are already present on their local machine. My own development environments are IDENTICAL across all three major platforms.

Virtualization and Docket are orthogonal technologies. The reason you use docker, especially in dev, is to have the exact same system libraries, dependencies, and settings on each build. The reason you use virtualization is to access hardware and kernel features that are not present on your hardware or native OS.

If you deploy on docker (or Kubernetes) on Linux in production, then ideally you should be using docker on your local system as well. Which, for Windows or MacOS users, requires a Linux VM as well.

It seems that you're trying to "educate" me on how containers and virtualization work, when in fact I've been doing this for a while, on macOS, Linux and Windows (itself having its own Hyper-V pitfalls).

I know you mean well, though.

There is no Docker on macOS without a hypervisor layer - period - and a VM, though there are multiple possible container runtimes not named Docker that are suitable for devops-y local development deployments (which will always, of course, be constrained in comparison to the scale of lab / staging / production environments). Some of these can better leverage the Rosetta 2 translation layer that Apple provides, than others.

I'm sorry that I came up as patronizing, I was more so trying to explain my confusion and thought process rather than to teach you about virtualization and containers.

Specifically what confused me in your comment was that you were saying Docker on Mac was superseded by their new native virtualization, which just doesn't make sense to me, for the reasons I was bringing up. I still don't understand what you were trying to say; replacing docker with podman or containerd or something else still doesn't have anything to do with virtualization or Rosetta, or at least I don't see the connection.

I should also say that I don't think anyone really means specifically docker when they talk about it, they probably mean containerization + image repos in general.

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