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Comment by BossingAround | Hacker News Reader

I suspect "Apple silicon" will not really be very suitable for software engineering.

Their performance claims are the very essence of vague, but Apple sure seems certain it will be great for software engineering. I'm curious. I won't be convinced until we get some real data, but signs seem to point that way. What makes you strongly suspect it won't be great?

    Build code in Xcode up to 2.8x faster.
    
    [...]

    Compile four times as much code on a single charge, thanks to the game-changing performance per watt of the M1 chip.

source: https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2020/11/introducing-the-next-...

I have a hunch it will be adequate for single-threaded tasks and the real gains will come for multithreaded compilation, since its superior thermals should enable it to run all cores at full blast for longer periods of time without throttling, relative to the intel silicon it replaces.

Not everyone's codebase is an over-bloated mess

I've been building an over-bloated mess on Apple silicon for months now; it's been quite good at it actually.

For now, most developers use MacBooks and tools like vscode already have apple silicon build.

Saying that "most developers use MacBooks" requires a very different understanding from mine of what the words "most" or "developers" mean.

You are downvoted, but you are right. In Asia (esp India, Indonesia, Phillipines & China) but also in the EU, I see 'most developers' walking around with PC (Linux or Windows=>mostly Windows of course) laptops. I would say that by a very large margin 'most developers' on earth use Windows machines.

The most vocal and visible (and rich) ones have Macbook's though, i guess that's where the idea comes from.

According to the Stackoverflow Survey 2019, 45% use Windows, 29% use MacOS, 25% use GNU+Linux

It's actually from the 2020 survey in 2019 windows was at 47,5% and in 2018 at 49,9%. Unfortunately this metric apparently wasn't tracked in 2017 so we'll never be sure if they were above 50% back then.

So currently the majority of responding dev use a POSIX (mostly)-compliant operating system. That is actual food for thought.

Sources: https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2018#technology-_-... https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2019#technology-_-... https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2020#technology-de...

I'm guessing some took issue with the possibly poorly phrased "our understanding [...] of what [...] 'developers' mean [differ]". It can be read as me dismissing people that use Macs as "not real developers", where my intent was to counteract the opposite: people dismissing others that might be using Windows as "not real developers" because otherwise they would be using Macs, which is circular logic that I have heard expressed in the past. And I say that as someone who has used Macs at work for the past decade.

I suspect your suspicion is going to be very wrong.

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