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diegoperini

Dear developers with M1 Airs,

How does your dev tools behave with this device?

Docker, entire Android toolchain (this one important), XCode, qemu, VirtualBox, you name it.

(I'm planning to get one)

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- Docker: I've had no issue with arm64 containers so far. Most of my x86 containers appear to work fine (albeit noticeably slower) under QEMU, except none of the MySQL containers start for some reason. They crash out with a Go error, so I feel like it's a Docker issue rather than a QEMU issue?

- Xcode: Don't have much cause to use it, but in my limited playing around it's totally fine, as I would expect from a 1st party product.

- VirtualBox: Incompatible, with apparently no intent to support ARM hosts at all. I've installed Windows for ARM in the Parallels M1 Tech Preview though, and that seems to work fine. There's also UTM which will use virtualisation for arm64 guests and QEMU for x86.

- Installing random stuff via MacPorts: Totally fine, a lot of the packages I needed (nginx, PHP, etc.) are already available for arm64. The only issues I've had are Big Sur related, not ARM specific.

> - Docker: I've had no issue with arm64 containers so far. Most of my x86 containers appear to work fine (albeit noticeably slower) under QEMU, except none of the MySQL containers start for some reason. They crash out with a Go error, so I feel like it's a Docker issue rather than a QEMU issue?

Do you run Docker under QEMU or QEMU under Docker? How does that work exactly?

Docker apparently makes use of a Linux feature that can hand other-arch binaries off to another application to deal with.

This post on the Docker blog explains it generally: https://www.docker.com/blog/multi-platform-docker-builds/

Thank you so much for telling me this!

XCode works amazingly well - compiling a small project, live preview and running the simulator just feels fast, not like waiting for a machine with too few resources to do something. The Air lasts roughly 10-12 hours on one charge.

Docker and PyCharm are also working well, but the Air only lasts like 7ish hours before it needs to be plugged in again.

Parallels VMs (Debian) work, but drain the battery and feel a bit more sluggish than I am used to. Something I hope will improve once Parallels officially supports the M1, not just in a tech preview.

I did not encounter any problems with any of the tools I use (Fork, Paw, iTerm) and last I checked most have support for the M1 (I try to use as many native apps as possible).

I can't believe we're at a point where we're using the word 'only' to describe a laptop running dev tooling on battery for 7 hours.

It's all very exciting!

I use PHPStorm with Docker for my development environment. Against all odds, it actually works perfectly.

MariaDB, Redis, nginx and some php/laravel services

The only thing that I had trouble with was building the images, they're large images with over 200 build steps (laradock), and it took a really long time to build them. Then again, I haven't compared build times to my surface pro 7 or my ryzen 1800x, it just felt incredibly slow

I have a Mac Mini with an M1. We got it for testing, but I've played with it a bit and can answer a few questions.

Homebrew seems to be fine. Some packages have M1 versions and others run via Rosetta. Parallels has a preview version of Parallels Desktop for Mac that can run both Linux and Windows (tested both) for ARM64. Windows/ARM64 has its own Rosetta-like thing that seems able to run most Windows software.

The M1 is stupidly fast. Going from a relatively high end Intel laptop to the M1 feels like going from a 286 to a 486 back in the 1990s, and the thing barely gets warm even after you max it out for an hour. Intel is finished.

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