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Ask HN: How are you dealing with the M1/ARM migration?

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21–30 of 284 posts

Re: Ask HN: How are you dealing with the M1/ARM migration?

#21
post #18

I tried going from a 2018 MBP to M1 MBA in 2021 and had too many issues to make it my primary machine. Docker and Android development were particularly brutal to get going reliably IIRC. The M1 performed well for the things it could do, but I still needed the MBP (which constantly reached 100% CPU) for other stuff, so I ended up doing a horrible multi-machine setup with Synergy. That was a dark time in my life ;) The…

I've been doing React Native development on my M1 MBP and it's been pretty great overall.

But is anyone else surprised how long it's taking to get the iOS Simulator for ARM? I feel like it would make a massive difference to my developer experience (especially in battery). And I haven't seen any indication that it's coming anytime soon.

Re: Ask HN: How are you dealing with the M1/ARM migration?

#22
I don't have Mac, I'm a Linux user but many if my colleagues have Macs, some of them are M1. And the arm thing is really a pain, much more than the difference between OSes. Just a random example: we have some app which uses MySQL 5.7, and we use MySQL in docker for integration tests. Unfortunately MySQL 5.7 won't run on arm (current workaround: they use a mariadb image, which is apparently good enough, and the CI would catch any difference). There are many small things like this, I would currently not recommend using those new Macs until things improve if you want to avoid wasting time on uninteresting issues.

Re: Ask HN: How are you dealing with the M1/ARM migration?

#26
post #22

I don't have Mac, I'm a Linux user but many if my colleagues have Macs, some of them are M1. And the arm thing is really a pain, much more than the difference between OSes. Just a random example: we have some app which uses MySQL 5.7, and we use MySQL in docker for integration tests. Unfortunately MySQL 5.7 won't run on arm (current workaround: they use a mariadb image, which is apparently good enough, and the CI wou…

You can run x64 containers on M1, it's just slower. Just add the `--platform linux/amd64` flag

Re: Ask HN: How are you dealing with the M1/ARM migration?

#27
At least some aspects of this issue are getting better as we speak. The latest Mac OS (in beta) supports virtualizing ARM Linux but also enables the ARM Linux system to use Apple's speedy Rosetta 2 x86 binary compiler and JIT compiler to run x86 programs within the ARM Linux VM. Based on descriptions, it seems that the rest of the hypervisor VM framework has also matured substantially this release.

https://developer.apple.com/documentation/virtualization/run...

https://developers.apple.com/videos/play/wwdc2022/10002/

If you are not familiar, Rosetta is how Apple Silicon Macs run existing Mac x86 binaries and it is highly performant. It does binary pre-compilation and cacheing. It also works with JIT systems. They are now making that available within Linux VMs running on Macs.

Re: Ask HN: How are you dealing with the M1/ARM migration?

#28
post #22

I don't have Mac, I'm a Linux user but many if my colleagues have Macs, some of them are M1. And the arm thing is really a pain, much more than the difference between OSes. Just a random example: we have some app which uses MySQL 5.7, and we use MySQL in docker for integration tests. Unfortunately MySQL 5.7 won't run on arm (current workaround: they use a mariadb image, which is apparently good enough, and the CI wou…

Sucks you need 5.7 I guess. I have a native install of 8.0.29 on my Mac Mini for my gitea.

Re: Ask HN: How are you dealing with the M1/ARM migration?

#29
post #18

I tried going from a 2018 MBP to M1 MBA in 2021 and had too many issues to make it my primary machine. Docker and Android development were particularly brutal to get going reliably IIRC. The M1 performed well for the things it could do, but I still needed the MBP (which constantly reached 100% CPU) for other stuff, so I ended up doing a horrible multi-machine setup with Synergy. That was a dark time in my life ;) The…

I've been doing React Native development on my M1 MBP and it's been pretty great overall. But is anyone else surprised how long it's taking to get the iOS Simulator for ARM? I feel like it would make a massive difference to my developer experience (especially in battery). And I haven't seen any indication that it's coming anytime soon.

I didn't realize it wasn't already ARM. I found one day (https://stackoverflow.com/a/68929949) that running Simulator with Rosetta allows momentum scrolling to work, and everything else seemed perfect, so I left it that way.

Re: Ask HN: How are you dealing with the M1/ARM migration?

#30
I'm an Eng for a startup using Rails, MySQL, ... Next.js.

The only problems we've had is slow performance of Docker for us with our databases. So much so, we've moved those out of Docker and back to the native. Performance is easily 6x faster. MySQL was also a headache because finding a MySQL 5.7 official Docker container didn't exist for ARM so we needed to use the slow emulation through qemu.

We also have a CLI dev tool that is written in Python and distributed in Docker (x86) which has also been slow. Not enough time to build ARM based Docker image.

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