Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

doordash.engineering

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 135 posts

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

#61

Post by criddell »

asdff wrote: post #52

Why do companies even build locally anymore? It's never been cheaper to spin up your own cluster that's going to be more than enough horsepower. If you give your devs the $899 air instead of the $2300 16", I feel like that $1400 surplus per dev would go a long way in buying some nodes that are going to still be some muscle 5 years from now. You could buy two mac minis per dev and set up an m1 cluster if you wanted. I…

For a lot of companies, $1400 per developer isn't enough to worry about. That's probably a day or two of all-in developer time. Not worth it for something you are only paying for every year or two, especially if your developer prefers the 16" machine over the Air.

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

#62

Post by StillBored »

vmception wrote: post #45
sitzkrieg wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

well professionally (and its likely a lot more than that), but in the hobby market there are a lot of low end devices with free or zero cost tools.

The iCE40 boards are sub $20 (iCESugar nano) and have an open source toolchains. And things like the ECP5(G) boards are large enough to host full RISC-V/etc environments for less than $50.

So, yah, FPGA's can get outrageously expensive, but there are a lot of low end devices with a lot of capabilities (those ECP5's have highspeed serdes, which can act as PCIe cards for example).

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

#63

Post by criddell »

thebean11 wrote: post #5
zitterbewegung wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I guess the new benchmark for development is can it run Slack? (While developing)

In my experience, yeah unfortunately. Slack goes to shit if the computer is under load, way before other software.

Just be thankful you don't have to use Teams.

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

#64

Post by Ologn »

I bought an MBP with an M1 two weeks ago. Never owned a Macbook before, although I use a company MBP, which is older and Intel based.

Actually I wanted to compile an Android app on it, which uses some C code. On an MPB with an M1, Android Studio does not handle that natively and without hassle in Android Studio release, or beta - they seem to have some support in Android Studio Canary now, with a little futzing.

I'm not in a rush, and will probably wait until I can just compile the Android app from Android Studio release without any jury-rigging needed. So I'm not stuck really, I have the time to wait for it to all get into the NDK post-canary release and the Android Studio post-canary release and I will proceed from there.

Also, I have never used Fidelity's Active Trader Pro app, and wanted to check it out as my desktop is a System76 box running Ubuntu and ATP is not available for that. So I tried to install on the MBP with M1 and - no go. Not sure what is needed for this to go on.

I think I have Rosetta installed, but hasn't helped much.

I'm not really stuck on these things, they're just observations. It is as fast as everyone says. The local app store only 16G RAM MBP's in stock so I got one instead of waiting for a 32G RAM one. Android Studio still compiles apps pretty quick though.

It would be nice if all of these apps and operations worked smoothly and out of the box now, but it's not a huge deal. The purchase works for me for other things and neither of these things have high urgency presently.

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

#65

Post by Gigachad »

theplumber wrote: post #30
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…

Look at the bright side: bad/lazy software helps the world develop faster computers that can be used efficiently for "real" projects (i.e scientific research). If the computers would be "fast" enough there would be no incentive to make them faster and we would never reach singularity

It's also probably just the most efficient use of time and resources. "The market" could chose to optimize the last drop of speed out of millions of bits of software, or improve the speed of a handful of chips which benefits those million bits of software.

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

#66

Post by jon889 »

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've actually found SwiftUI previews work fairly well, have to admit they get better with every Xcode version, and I don't understand why sometimes they need to recompile. Using them I generate snapshot tests automatically, and an app for our designer to see the various UI components on device through TestFlight. Currently only for our UI components library, but I'm hoping to expand the automatic snapshot testing to the app at some point.

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

#67

Post by KerrAvon »

nyanpasu64 wrote: post #56
spiderice wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> and there's zero good reason that Apple couldn't provide their build tools for other platforms How do you figure? Then Apple would have to maintain their build tools for other platforms. Waste of resources for something that ultimately isn't going to make Apple money. It's no different than Microsoft intentionally gimping Excel on Mac. I've never seen anyone complain that they have to own a Windows computer to deve…

> Then Apple would have to maintain their build tools for other platforms. Waste of resources for something that ultimately isn't going to make Apple money. It makes sense on Apple's part, but I still dislike it. > I've never seen anyone complain that they have to own a Windows computer to develop Windows apps. Windows can be installed on any computer, whereas macOS requires purchasing Mac hardware. Additionally you…

> Windows can be installed on any computer, whereas macOS requires purchasing Mac hardware

Running Windows natively requires an Intel PC. an Intel Mac via Boot Camp (but I'd advise buying a two-button mouse with a scroll wheel if you do that), or a subset of ARM PCs for which Microsoft provides ARM builds. That's definitely not "any computer" or even "practically any computer."

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

#68

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

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

#69

Post by [deleted] »

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 $…

[deleted]

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

#70

Post by [deleted] »

[deleted] wrote: post #68
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…

[deleted]

[deleted]
Post reply on HN