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Tracking developer build times to decide if the M3 MacBook is worth upgrading

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Re: Tracking developer build times to decide if the M3 MacBook is worth upgrading

#101

Post by lawrjone »

wtetzner wrote: post #93
fsckboy wrote: post #89

I feel like there is a correlation between fast-twitch programming muscles and technical debt. Some coding styles that are rewarded by fast compile times can be more akin to "throw it at the wall, see if it sticks" style development. Have you ever been summoned to help a junior colleague who is having a problem, and you immediately see some grievous errors, errors that give you pause. You point the first couple out,…

There's a lot of value in a short iteration loop when debugging unexpected behavior. Often you end up needing to keep trying different variations until you understand what's going on.

Yeah there’s a large body of research that shows faster feedback cycles help developers be more productive.

There’s nothing that says you can’t have fast feedback loops _and_ think carefully about your code and next debugging loop, but you frequently need to run and observe code to understand the next step.

In those cases even the best programmer can’t overcome a much slower build.

Re: Tracking developer build times to decide if the M3 MacBook is worth upgrading

#102

Post by serf »

endless1234 wrote: post #44
mgaunard wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

Perhaps many people building code do not need multiple 16x PCI-Express cards in their day to day workflow, but like being able to move around with their laptop?

Yeah , perhaps -- but

>Apple Silicon devices can get the same performance as a desktop in a laptop size.

is still unequivocally wrong, bordering on belligerent marketing misinformation.

Re: Tracking developer build times to decide if the M3 MacBook is worth upgrading

#103

Post by mdbauman »

jiggawatts wrote: post #97
LASR wrote: post #90

Solid analysis. A word of warning from personal experience: I am part of a medium-sized software company (2k employees). A few years ago, we wanted to improve dev productivity. Instead of going with new laptops, we decided to explore offloading the dev stack over to AWS boxes. This turned out to be a multi-year project with a whole team of devs (~4) working on it full-time. In hindsight, the tradeoff wasn't worth it.…

https://xkcd.com/1205/

This xkcd seems relevant also: https://xkcd.com/303/

One thing that jumps out at me is the assumption that compile time implies wasted time. The linked Martin Fowler article provides justification for this, saying that longer feedback loops provide an opportunity to get distracted or leave a flow state while ex. checking email or getting coffee. The thing is, you don't have to go work on a completely unrelated task. The code is still in front of you and you can still be thinking about it, realizing there's yet another corner case you need to write a test for. Maybe you're not getting instant gratification, but surely a 2-minute compile time doesn't imply 2 whole minutes of wasted time.

Re: Tracking developer build times to decide if the M3 MacBook is worth upgrading

#104

Post by dgdosen »

mgrandl wrote: post #63
tomaskafka wrote: post #47

My personal research for iOS development, taking the cost into consideration, concluded: - M2 Pro is nice, but the improvement over 10 core (8 perf cores) M1 Pro is not that large (136 vs 120 s in Xcode benchmark: https://github.com/devMEremenko/XcodeBenchmark ) - M3 Pro is nerfed (only 6 perf cores) to better distinguish and sell M3 Max, basically on par with M2 Pro So, in the end, I got a slightly used 10 core M1 P…

The M3 Pro being nerfed has been parroted on the Internet since the announcement. Practically it’s a great choice. It’s much more efficient than the M2 Pro at slightly better performance. That’s what I am looking for in a laptop. I don’t really have a usecase for the memory bandwidth…

I picked up an M3Pro/11/14/36GB/1TB to 'test' over the long holiday return period to see if I need an M3 Max. For my workflow (similar to blog post) - I don't! I'm very happy with this machine.

Die shots show the CPU cores take up so little space compared to GPUs on both the Pro and Max... I wonder why.

Re: Tracking developer build times to decide if the M3 MacBook is worth upgrading

#105

Post by LanzVonL »

packetlost wrote: post #4
LanzVonL wrote: post #3

We've found that distributed building has pretty much eliminated the need to upgrading developer workstations. Super easy to set up, too.

Distributed building of what ? Because for every language the answer of whether it's easy or not is probably different.

[flagged]

Re: Tracking developer build times to decide if the M3 MacBook is worth upgrading

#106

Post by gray_-_wolf »

lawrjone wrote: post #75
isthisreallife9 wrote: post #60

[flagged]

Fwiw I've spent my whole career doing data analysis but the ease at which I was able to use OpenAI to help me for this post (am author) blew me away. The fact that I can do this type of analysis is why I appreciate it so much. It's one of the reasons I'm convinced AI engineering find its way into the average software engineer's remit ( https://blog.lawrencejones.dev/2023/#ai ) because it makes this analysis far more…

> it makes this analysis far more accessible than it was before

How does the average engineer verify if the result is correct? You claim (and I believe you) to be able to do this "by hand", if required. Great, but that likely means you are able to catch when LLM makes an mistake. Any ideas on how average engineer, without much experience in this area, should validate the results?

Re: Tracking developer build times to decide if the M3 MacBook is worth upgrading

#107

Post by jim180 »

tomaskafka wrote: post #47

My personal research for iOS development, taking the cost into consideration, concluded: - M2 Pro is nice, but the improvement over 10 core (8 perf cores) M1 Pro is not that large (136 vs 120 s in Xcode benchmark: https://github.com/devMEremenko/XcodeBenchmark ) - M3 Pro is nerfed (only 6 perf cores) to better distinguish and sell M3 Max, basically on par with M2 Pro So, in the end, I got a slightly used 10 core M1 P…

I love my M1 MacBook Air for iOS development. One thing, I'd like to have from Pro line is the screen, and just the PPI part. While 120Hz is a nice thing to have, it won't happen on Air laptops.

Re: Tracking developer build times to decide if the M3 MacBook is worth upgrading

#108

Post by jackmott »

Aurornis wrote: post #68
tomaskafka wrote: post #47

My personal research for iOS development, taking the cost into consideration, concluded: - M2 Pro is nice, but the improvement over 10 core (8 perf cores) M1 Pro is not that large (136 vs 120 s in Xcode benchmark: https://github.com/devMEremenko/XcodeBenchmark ) - M3 Pro is nerfed (only 6 perf cores) to better distinguish and sell M3 Max, basically on par with M2 Pro So, in the end, I got a slightly used 10 core M1 P…

My experience was similar: In real world compile times, the M1 Pro still hangs quite closely to the current laptop M2 and M3 models. Nothing as significant as the differences in this article. I could depend on the language or project, but in head-to-head benchmarks of identical compile commands I didn’t see any differences this big.

[dead]

Re: Tracking developer build times to decide if the M3 MacBook is worth upgrading

#109

Post by WaxProlix »

LASR wrote: post #90

Solid analysis. A word of warning from personal experience: I am part of a medium-sized software company (2k employees). A few years ago, we wanted to improve dev productivity. Instead of going with new laptops, we decided to explore offloading the dev stack over to AWS boxes. This turned out to be a multi-year project with a whole team of devs (~4) working on it full-time. In hindsight, the tradeoff wasn't worth it.…

I suspect things like GitHub's Codespaces offering will be more and more popular as time goes on for this kind of thing. Did you guys try out some of the AWS Cloud9 or other 'canned' dev env offerings?
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