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

news.ycombinator.com

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

#41

Post by mountain_peak »

usrn wrote: post #20

I almost exclusively use FOSS. Most of it was ported a decade ago at least.

Great answer and definitely in keeping with the original vision of what computing should be - open and accessible.

Maybe people here haven't lived through 68K to PPC migrations, or to DEC Alpha, or Sun SPARC to Intel, or PPC to Intel, or any number of platforms and platform shifts - some lasted longer than others, but all had their ups and downs. The largest 'down' was predatory business practices in the 80s and 90s, which set computing back a decade (and still apparently continues today). It's unfortunate that many of these FUD-type articles pop up whenever a new platform/chip is announced. I'm excited for technological progress and think that every new announcement is another small miracle that I'm happy to be around for.

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

#42

Post by dev_tty01 »

azinman2 wrote: post #34
dev_tty01 wrote: post #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.…

My understanding is the AOT won’t be available to Linux; it’s JIT only.

Interesting. Where did you see that? I'm still trying to get a handle on the latest changes.

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

#43

Post by ridiculous_fish »

For me it's been mostly painless. I've even used Time Machine to migrate from a 2012 Intel iMac to an Apple Silicon Mac Mini and it worked perfectly!

The two pain points:

1. No support for running older virtualized macOS. I like to test back to 10.9 and need an Intel Mac to do that.

2. One Python wheel which doesn't have Apple Silicon builds and doesn't build cleanly: https://github.com/CoolProp/CoolProp/issues/2003

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

#44

Post by kitsunesoba »

It's been silk smooth for native desktop (macOS) and mobile (iOS/Android) development. I make it a point to keep the projects I'm responsible for running with the latest toolchains, though.

The amount of trouble that some seem to be having with backend dev on M1 makes me wonder if maybe it wasn't the best idea for the industry to put its collective eggs in the single basket of trying to perfectly match dev and prod environments. If nothing else, it feels weird for progress and innovation in the world of end-user/developer-facing computing to be held back by that of the server world.

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

#45

Post by herpderperator »

If you need to work with amd64 Docker images on an M1, just SSH to an amd64 AWS instance and do the builds there while things get ironed out. Otherwise, you can do the builds with `docker build --platform linux/amd64` but it'll be slower since it's emulated.

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

#48

Post by mdp2021 »

dev_tty01 wrote: post #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.…

> highly performant

Last thing I read, 70% of the native performance was shown by running GeekBench through Rosetta (with a few odd results noted).

If somebody has better info...

Edit: I see that Nov 2020 checks returned an 80% performance, and there was discussion on HN at (at least) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25105597

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

#49

Post by neilalexander »

I do most of my work in Go (with the very occasional splash of Swift or Kotlin) and the move to M1 has been utterly seamless for me. So much so that I often forget I'm working on an ARM64 machine until I forget to set GOARCH when compiling and then try to copy a binary to a remote machine.

The majority of Docker images that I use are available for ARM and the few that aren't perform fine under Docker for Mac emulation (although the big performance boost that I saw ultimately came from enabling VirtioFS accelerated directory sharing).

Just about all of the tools that I use are now available as universal binaries, but before that, Rosetta was utterly seamless.

I really can't complain.

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

#50

Post by deeptote »

TL;DR - I tried it when the first m1's came out and it was a huge pain, ended up going back to x86 for my primary machine.

I got an m1 right when they came out because I started a new gig right around that time, literally happened the same week. Trying to get all my dev tools installed became a rat's nest of issues. I work as a backend / dist sys / systems engineer for my day job and so I have to write and use things that are fairly close to bare-metal. Brew hadn't been forked yet, so that added a whole new layer of issues.

Docker still doesn't work, Rust libs compile in weird ways... just all kinds of stuff that I'm not smart enough or paid well enough to figure out. My title is "Developer", not "M1 developer advocate" so after about a month of running into issue after issue, I went back and found a used MBP with an intel chip. I'm excited about the future of Apple silicon, and ARM as a whole, but it needs another couple years of refinement.

I will say that I've been using an m1 mac mini for general office work as apart of my side business and it's quite good.

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