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

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

incident.io

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

271–280 of 432 posts

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

#271

Post by dilyevsky »

euos wrote: post #223

I am ex-core contributor Chromium and Node.js and current core contributor to gRPC Core/C++. I am never bothered with build times. There is "interactive build" (incremental builds I use to rerun related unit tests as I work on code) and non-interactive build (one I launch and go get coffee/read email). I have never seen hardware refresh toggle non-interactive into interactive. My personal hardware (that I use now and…

Bazel is significantly faster on m1 compared to i7 even if it doesn’t try to recompile protobuf compiler code which it’s still attempting to do regularly

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

#272

Post by LanzVonL »

packetlost wrote: post #218
LanzVonL wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

Sooooo... C? You didn't answer the question and I would be surprised to hear that freaking Java had support for distributed compilation, and that has been around since the 90s. Take your pretentious non-answers elsewhere please.

[flagged]

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

#274

Post by dev_tty01 »

hsbauauvhabzb wrote: post #194
hmottestad wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What software are you worried about? Hackernews is a great place to share and hear if anyone has similar experiences or maybe managed to find a fix!

Mostly x86 virtual machines for Linux and Windows. ARM ports of both platforms exist but don’t always meet use cases (binary apps, etc).

You can run x86 binaries on ARM Linux VMs running on Apple Silicon machines.

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

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

#275

Post by dash2 »

NavinF wrote: post #239
dash2 wrote: post #78

As a scientist, I'm interested how computer programmers work with data. * They drew beautiful graphs! * They used chatgpt to automate their analysis super-fast! * ChatGPT punched out a reasonably sensible t test! But: * They had variation across memory and chip type, but they never thought of using a linear regression. * They drew histograms, which are hard to compare. They could have supplemented them with simple me…

> cumulative distribution functions, where you can see if they overlap or one is shifted Why would this be preferred over a PDF? I've rarely seen CDF plots after high school so I would have to convert the CDF into a PDF inside my head to check if the two distributions overlap or are shifted. CDFs are not a native representation for most people

If one line is to the right of the other everywhere, then the distribution is bigger everywhere. (“First order stochastic dominance” if you want to sound fancy.) I agree that CDFs are hard to interpret, but that is partly due to unfamiliarity.

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

#276

Post by cole-k »

gizmo wrote: post #228
euos wrote: post #223

I am ex-core contributor Chromium and Node.js and current core contributor to gRPC Core/C++. I am never bothered with build times. There is "interactive build" (incremental builds I use to rerun related unit tests as I work on code) and non-interactive build (one I launch and go get coffee/read email). I have never seen hardware refresh toggle non-interactive into interactive. My personal hardware (that I use now and…

Somehow programmers have come to accept that a minuscule change in a single function that only result in a few bytes changing in a binary takes forever to compile and link. Compilation and linking should be basically instantaneous. So fast that you don't even realize there is a compilation step at all. Sure, release builds with whole program optimization and other fancy compiler techniques can take longer. That's fin…

I mean yeah I've come to accept it because I don't know any different. If you can share some examples of large-scale projects that you can compile to test locally near-instantly - or how we might change existing projects/languages to allow for this - then you will have my attention instead of skepticism.

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

#278

Post by ksec »

To me, that is just another Data Set to prove how most of the MacBook are used in tech industry. And their upgrade cycle. 37 Million Registered Developers ( Many Overlap ). And many Devs using it for Web development. It seems Apple could have 40M of software developers using their platform. Out of ~125M active Mac users.

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

#279

Post by vladvasiliu »

rc_kas wrote: post #261
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.…

my company did this. fuck i hate it so much. if anyone wants to hire me away from this remote desktop hellscape, please do.

If I understand correctly, they're not talking about remote desktops. Rather, the editor is local and responds normally, while the heavy lifting of compilation is done remotely. I've dabbled in this myself, and it's nice enough.

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

#280

Post by dzek69 »

nox101 wrote: post #265
Aurornis wrote: post #64

This is a great write-up and I love all the different ways they collected and analyzed data. That said, it would have been much easier and more accurate to simply put each laptop side by side and run some timed compilations on the exact same scenarios: A full build, incremental build of a recent change set, incremental build impacting a module that must be rebuilt, and a couple more scenarios. Or write a script that…

I didn't see any analysis of network building as an alternative to M3s. For my project, ~40 million lines, past a certain minimum threshold, it doesn't matter how fast my machine is, it can't compete with the network build our infra-team makes. So sure, an M3 might make my build 30% faster than my M1 build, but the network build is 15x faster. Is it possible instead of giving the developers M3s they should have inves…

Maybe, but I feel that s not the point here
Post reply on HN