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Why Apple’s new M1 chips are essential for rapid iOS development

doordash.engineering

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Re: Why Apple’s new M1 chips are essential for rapid iOS development

#41

Post by kitsunesoba »

thebean11 wrote: post #2

Essential for any development occurring on a Mac IMO. I upgraded from a fully specced out 16inch to a base model M1 with the 32GB upgrade (a machine roughly half the price I think) and it's night and day. I can use Docker now without Slack getting laggy.

I can’t wait for the next macOS + iOS updates so I can use Universal Control to run Slack on my iPad and never have to open their bloated web/electron app ever again. I wish Slack would just let us run the iOS app on our macs with Catalyst, but they seem pretty bent on pushing desktop OS users to the web/electron version.

Re: Why Apple’s new M1 chips are essential for rapid iOS development

#42

Post by GeekyBear »

flax wrote: post #17

I had to laugh at the opening: "The tools are largely free", except the bare minimum to develop for ios is a mac and the apple developer account (if you ever expect to publish your app). And a significant subset of functionality only works on physical devices and not emulators. If you don't already have the mac and iphone, you're looking at $600 for a used macbook air, ~$300 for a used 2 generations old iphone, and $…

How quickly we forget what development costs looked like in the recent past

>PlayStation developers need to cough up £ 12,000 for the full system (which Sony is adamant it doesn’t make money on), although all subsequent software tools and hardware upgrades are free.

https://www.retroreversing.com/official-playStation-devkit

Not to mention other obscene costs that were common, like charging developers to issue a patch for software sold online.

>Double Fine's Tim Schaefer pegged the cost of submitting an Xbox 360 patch at $40,000

https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2012/07/microsoft-comes-under...

Re: Why Apple’s new M1 chips are essential for rapid iOS development

#43

Post by skydhash »

kitsunesoba wrote: post #37
paxys wrote: post #7

On one hand, these machines are clearly superior, and it's a no brainer for companies to purchase them for development. On the other, this is just another one in the long line of examples of bad software practices being overcome by throwing more money and hardware at the problem. Is there any reason for an iOS app build to take 8+ minutes to begin with? And does anyone realistically believe that once all developers h…

This may be true of 50-in-one megaprojects such as those from the likes of Uber and Google, but these machines are also beneficial to developers of more lean, focused, and optimized apps too. The few seconds my M1 Pro shaves off of incremental builds and the general improvements in IDE responsiveness compared to an upper-spec Intel mac pile up and become worth it quickly, not even mentioning quality of life improveme…

> far better battery life and being able to use the laptop in my lap comfortably

These are the mains reasons I sold my 2015 MBP to get the M1 Air. I was not doing anything computationally heavy, so I don't notice any performance improvement. But the Air never get hot. And the battery usage is so light that I don't worry over its charge status.

Re: Why Apple’s new M1 chips are essential for rapid iOS development

#44

Post by sixstringtheory »

tarentel wrote: post #32
kerbs wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your argument is more or less a critique of Swift itself, which is a far more full-featured and "safe" language than Objective-C, at the expense substantially higher compilation times given otherwise like-for-like programs. You're not necessarily wrong, but that ship has sailed for iOS development long ago and isn't necessarily the fault of teams like Doordash who have probably (like others) already squeezed as much…

Definitely will echo this. The app I work on is probably a lot of bloat which the op is complaining about but compared to the last app I worked on it's quite a bit less and compiles at least 5 times more slowly due to using swift where as the last project was 100% obj-c. Even if we could somehow manage to convince management to let us clean up the app we'd still be at the mercy of however long the swift compiler take…

Don't use type inference, and modularize the codebase into separate static libraries. That should reduce the amount of full rebuilds, and should make builds faster. (ETA: also try to avoid generics.)

Ofc, probably a lot harder to go back and redo a huge legacy codebase where you still have new deadlines to meet, but for folks just starting out, these should be guiding principles in a Swift codebase if you care about compilation time.

Re: Why Apple’s new M1 chips are essential for rapid iOS development

#45

Post by vmception »

sitzkrieg wrote: post #20
flax wrote: post #17

I had to laugh at the opening: "The tools are largely free", except the bare minimum to develop for ios is a mac and the apple developer account (if you ever expect to publish your app). And a significant subset of functionality only works on physical devices and not emulators. If you don't already have the mac and iphone, you're looking at $600 for a used macbook air, ~$300 for a used 2 generations old iphone, and $…

came to post this, what a joke. are they steeped in privilege or what?! maybe simply unaware of the alternative ecosystem costs

its not just about javascript and android, take a look at FPGA development... several multi thousand dollar licenses out the wazoo

Re: Why Apple’s new M1 chips are essential for rapid iOS development

#47

Post by flax »

ctdonath wrote: post #28
flax wrote: post #17

I had to laugh at the opening: "The tools are largely free", except the bare minimum to develop for ios is a mac and the apple developer account (if you ever expect to publish your app). And a significant subset of functionality only works on physical devices and not emulators. If you don't already have the mac and iphone, you're looking at $600 for a used macbook air, ~$300 for a used 2 generations old iphone, and $…

You need a computer to compile at all. If you’re doing iOS you probably already have an iPhone. Old physical phones (cheap) are fine for dev, can simulate latest. $100/yr only needed if you’re actually charging for the app - which should earn you those costs pretty soon. Yes, $1000 baseline for what you likely already have most of. The “largely free” is in contrast with platforms having >$25,000/yr entry costs just f…

Except that it's actually in direct contrast with Android development, where the tools are available, for actually free, for Windows, Linux, and Mac. And the developer account is a one time $25.

My personal situation: I wanted to add an iOS client for the game I've been developing in Flutter. I did not have a mac or an iphone already. Fortunately, I've been able to borrow them for builds and occasional testing. But, that's obviously not optimal, and there's zero good reason that Apple couldn't provide their build tools for other platforms. Instead, they leverage their monopoly on the app store to force hardware sales to developers.

Re: Why Apple’s new M1 chips are essential for rapid iOS development

#49

Post by saurik »

luigi23 wrote: post #8

"Based on rough usage patterns, we assumed an average iOS engineer does around five clean builds and 30 incremental builds each day..." ...wait, what? I know YMMW, but for me and most of my colleagues it's 1-2 clean build per day and 30 incremental... per hour, sometimes. "...In parallel with our modularization effort, we’re also adopting new technologies like SwiftUI and Xcode Previews. These technologies allow us t…

> I know YMMW, but for me and most of my colleagues it's 1-2 clean build per day and 30 incremental... per hour, sometimes.

Yeah, this doesn't make any sense for me either... I only do clean builds of any of my software when I am working on the build system itself or am cutting releases (so I'd measure them on a small handful per week), and I'm constantly doing incremental builds so quickly it is essentially a pipeline: I don't even wait for the build to finish before I'm making more changes. Why are they doing so many clean rebuilds?

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