A lot of their speed comes from special tricks like bypassing the kernel and going direct to hardware (DPDK).

Intel's DPDK doesn't support Mac OS X.

You should probably develop in a VM anyways, or at least with a platform + hardware that supports these features so you can better match what production deployments will be like.

I always cringe a little, for backend systems software, when people develop in an environment completely divorced from their production environment. It just creates headaches.