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Comment by lsllc | Hacker News Reader

Sounds a bit like Docker is at a loss. Caught between a closed source OS (rock) and an architecture change (hard place).

Ideally, they could leverage Rosetta2 to run x64 containers under macOS on Apple Silicon ... but I guess Apple isn't playing ball (because otherwise they would have probably announced it at WWDC).

At this point I see an Apple Silicon based Mac is just a consumer device, I don't think I'm going to be able to use it in anger for development work at the moment (other than for Mac consumer apps).

Not really sure what Apple have to lose here ... but if Macs with Apple Silicon are not a viable dev platform for "mainstream" containers, then that's going to drive developers to Linux (or Windows).

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> At this point I see an Apple Silicon based Mac is just a consumer device

Not everyone runs Docker or similar to do their work.

If it turns out that Apple’s performance claims are true, I don’t see people easily letting it go, a snappy machine is a serious advantage. After all, we are in this deep trouble because of the endless layers of abstraction, so I don’t see it getting any speedier anytime soon for the status quo.

Amazing blank sheets could open on this news M1 macs.

The performance claims are substantial, it could mean 3000$ snappiness at 1000$. A bit like making cheap DSLR and now everyone is a professional photographer, making room for new tools for the new comers.

Mac prices are the gatekeeper for the Apple dev ecosystem in the developing world or students from low income background because most will try to get the best bang for their limited bucks. Maybe it’s possible to unlock it?

If Docker performance on Mac was a disincentive for using it, then people would have abandoned it because of the hypervisor instead of container architecture.

Not docker performance but IDE and other tools performance and effortlessness.

That's where tool user, AKA "The Developer" experiences the performance. If the autocomplete comes up fast, you are a happy developer, if your scripts finish running instantly on every save, you are a happy developer. If you click and it runs, you are a happy developer. If you think about it, Docker itself is about that comfort of not having to deal with the tool setup every time. On Apple dev technology that's the default without Docker. Search for Xcode on AppStore, click download, click open once it's downloaded, write your Swift code that can do UI and backend , click run and it runs. Sometimes autocomplete stops working but you just close Xcode and open it again and it works :)

There's nothing you can't do on 2015 Macbook Air that can be done on a fresh high end Macbook Pro. The difference comes from the comfort of being snappy and people pay multiple times more for that snappiness.

> Mac prices are the gatekeeper for the Apple dev ecosystem in the developing world or students from low income background

Isn't the yearly $199 developers fee a greater gatekeeper by design for people with a low income from participating in Apples ecosystem?

It's $99 and it's not a gatekeeper to anything. People who need the developer program subscription easily make multiple of it each month even in the poorest countries. You only need it if you are going to distribute apps through Apple AppStore, you don't need it for anything else.

But you need the $99 before you can make the money in the App Store.

That's true. You will also need a computer, a chair, a desk and food to learn and develop apps.

AppStore Developer subscription is not a social security program, you will need some capital to run business on it.

It is like the need to spent money to buy the flour and the chocolate before making money from your first donuts. Standart business stuff.

I have bought a computer, I have now bought a chair. I don't need to buy a new computer or a new chair if my development takes longer than a year.

I don't know what you mean about a social security system, I don't think anyone is talking about that so it's a bit nonsense.

The point is it is a gatekeeper. Your first app that you build doesn't make $115? Then you didn't break even and you are down, and are taxed another $100. Considering that Apple then billing you 15% on your takings, it is another bar to clear.

It's hard to follow this thought process. Somehow you claim that you are entitled to do business on one company's systems on terms that you decide. This doesn't make any sense what so ever. It sounds like those people who think they should own all the movies, music or software for free because they pay for an internet connection.

If you don't like the business proposition, just don't do business with Apple. Go make apps for Google Play store or Huawei or anything else.

Yes, you need to pay the $99 to have a registered developer account, which is required to digitally sign apps to distribute through the App Store. Of course, you can download and use the dev tools for free, and distribute/sell your apps any way you like, without paying Apple anything. So if the App Store isn't worth $99 as a sales channel, don't pay it.

There's an ironic parallel in Docker referring to software as "content".

Wait until parents refer their childs as DLC.

Not sure what you are talking about, I do all sorts of Docker stuff on ARM (home lab Pi's and Graviton2 for work).

This is actually going to make it easier for me, as more ARM base images will get created.

AWS Graviton 2 ARM instances are more cost effective for most server loads. This is a gateway to saving a lot of cloud spend.

I agree with you, but there's probably already been some pressure with people wanting to use Raspberry PIs/other ARM-based boards for K8s clusters. I wonder where that tipping point will come.

Anandtech's benchmarks: https://www.anandtech.com/show/15578/cloud-clash-amazon-grav... Here's a tweet about one company's experience: https://twitter.com/lizthegrey/status/1314618333140971521

Ubuntu on Arm is mature. I see no reason why Docker on Mac can't be running Armbuntu VMs.

Most of the Raspberry Pi trials I see end in lots of $100/hr developer time spent waiting for a $10 device to finish being slow. Or, worse, inflicting that experience on customers at a demo booth. It's not an attractive look. A high quality ARM desktop experience could change that.

I have been coding for 30+ years, and am yet to run Docker in anger.

And by the looks of it, when I finally get to do some project with it, the language specific runtime tools like Project Tye for .NET would already have replaced it.

Docker Desktop is closed source on all platform it supports. It’s one of the reasons I don’t like to use it even on Windows. There is no way to report bugs (no one from dev team replies to it), and no bug fixes from the community are possible. When using containers nowadays I would keep everything open source, like LXC/LXD, Cri-O, Podman. All run perfectly fine on the Linux kernel that comes with Windows. Apple has to do something similar to WSL to make devs happy.

I think Apple didn’t want to support x86 emulation at all, and made Rosetta 2 purely AOT compilation (which you can’t really do with virtual machines). It makes it so they don’t have to deal with having x86 VMs available but super slow making people think that Apple Silicon is slow (even if that’s untrue), and that’s kind of the growing pain that Microsoft is going through at the moment with Windows on ARM.

Rosetta 2 purely AOT? Where did you get that idea from?

It certainly still does some JIT/interpretation at runtime but it does indeed translate the executable upon first launch.^1 I can’t imagine how it would be able to fully translate a browser JavaScript engine that’s doing its own JIT, for example.

1: https://www.macrumors.com/2020/11/12/rosetta-2-translation-c...

Just like the original Rosetta it does indeed cache translations as well as support JIT and other forms of dynamic translation.

Exactly. It does AOT, but certainly not exclusively.

Automatic translation of a hypervisor, guest kernel, and guest userspace is a far different level of difficulty than translating a userspace application.

Saying "didn't want to support" implies that one can "just" repurpose binary translation with a few build settings. You're off by several orders of magnitude.

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