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I sort of hope people are waking up from the rut the industry has been. OSX for dev, Linux for backend services... Even AWS. If I were to start another company

I sort of hope people are waking up from the rut the industry has been. OSX for dev, Linux for backend services... Even AWS. If I were to start another company today, I'd almost surely be using none of these options to max my productivity. Right now, OSX has become increasingly hostile to dev and Linux is great at modularizing other features FreeBSD built years ago. Lately I've been trying to ship software from the newly open sourced and open-er licensed .NET CoreCLR and Mono (via C# & F# respectively) and FreeBSD. The results are surprisingly good, especially with the new native executable compilation target stuff. And the docker pass-through to FreeBSD jails is hot like the sun. It's like a Docker container with similar constraints but without such severe security issues. That and the new network stack makes containers on FreeBSD pretty compelling, even compared to the 1.9 security work. And there is that thing where linux is locked in a death roll with itself regarding its initalization system? Freebsd don't have that. And that thing where Apple makes you boot into safe mode and flip an NVRAM bit to actually have root on your box? Of course, I'm not personally shipping code on iOS, so this discussion is a lot more flexible for me than it might be for many.

kris-s 11y ago
What would you develop on then?
- KirinDave 11y ago
  Backend services, maybe micro maybe not. The CLR has really great support for a hybrid async/threadpool model and C# has direct language support. There's a framework called "ServiceStack" which tastes a lot like Jetty that you can use to avoid the ASP.NET-influenced technologies and approach things in a lightweight way. There is also a developer preview of actual native compilation, which means your deploy story in a container is competitive with Go and startup times for a statically linked binary are great. This means it's actually outperforming Java for containerized deploys (in this specific facet). Azure and GCE are both really, really good compared to EC2. Hell, GCE is shipping actual Kubernetes support and I want to migrate our entire tech stack to that. Already we've migrated our growing website to it, and as soon as they fix some network performance issues (already fixed in master, but we don't use beta orchestration software in production), we'll flip the switch on that as it elegantly solves some really shitty problems you hit in AWS VPCs. I like F# a lot, by the way. I can't wait to use it more. It's like OCaml but with a lot of the amenities you expect from the JVM ecosystem (like, for example, the ever-required but poorly supported datetime libraries) and LINQ support, which is pervasive, user-extensible object comprehensions with compiler support. C# doesn't excite me so much, but it has a REPL and it's certainly a more advanced language than Java.
fredsir 11y ago
If I could find another OS that give me the same ability to do stuff that OS X does, and it was more open and developer/me friendly, I would switch in a heartbeat. Things that my Mac + OS X gives me, that other I have not found anywhere is includes 10+ hour battery with excellent power-tooling, excellent hardware design that is robust, nice looking and feeling, a desktop environment that works for the most part and lets me work on my software without getting in the way, while still being top notch when it comes to quality of bundled software, graphics and such.
- KirinDave 11y ago
  > If I could find another OS that give me the same ability to do stuff that OS X does, and it was more open and developer/me friendly, I would switch in a heartbeat. I am using Windows 10 on a surface book. There are some minor glitches in a 1st gen product I admit wholeheartedly. Most are fixed for me. I had a defective unit off lot 0 but the replacement and recent driver updates have fixed everything but the "sometimes my mouse goes away" and "sometimes my screen pauses as the driver freaks out". Both are minor and correctible annoyances that are well known. The Surface book gives me 7-8 hours of battery life doing Clojure development with deploy cycles with casual use, with audio streaming and bluetooth headphones. This eclipses my i7 OSX boxes, current gen, that typically conk out around 5 hours in the same config. The SB has a funny behavior though, it does connected standby like a tablet. It'll hibernate, but the default is after 2 hours of standby. So you need to know that a bit of your battery life is being used there. I highly recommend the surface book, unless you're an iOS developer. Otherwise, your tools are universal. What I need is there: Docker support is handled via identical (or superior) mechanisms to what we do on OSX; X11 apps are supported about as well; you can get access to the tools you need but PowerShell is actually very whiz-bang and advanced once you see it for what it is; the security model is better than OSX; and honestly I like Win10 better than OSX, which feels incredibly dated by comparison.
  - vox_mollis 11y ago
    This sounds great, except some of us are wary about using an OS with a built-in keylogger and ambient sound recorder.

kris-s 11y ago

What would you develop on then?

KirinDave 11y ago
Backend services, maybe micro maybe not. The CLR has really great support for a hybrid async/threadpool model and C# has direct language support. There's a framework called "ServiceStack" which tastes a lot like Jetty that you can use to avoid the ASP.NET-influenced technologies and approach things in a lightweight way. There is also a developer preview of actual native compilation, which means your deploy story in a container is competitive with Go and startup times for a statically linked binary are great. This means it's actually outperforming Java for containerized deploys (in this specific facet). Azure and GCE are both really, really good compared to EC2. Hell, GCE is shipping actual Kubernetes support and I want to migrate our entire tech stack to that. Already we've migrated our growing website to it, and as soon as they fix some network performance issues (already fixed in master, but we don't use beta orchestration software in production), we'll flip the switch on that as it elegantly solves some really shitty problems you hit in AWS VPCs. I like F# a lot, by the way. I can't wait to use it more. It's like OCaml but with a lot of the amenities you expect from the JVM ecosystem (like, for example, the ever-required but poorly supported datetime libraries) and LINQ support, which is pervasive, user-extensible object comprehensions with compiler support. C# doesn't excite me so much, but it has a REPL and it's certainly a more advanced language than Java.

fredsir 11y ago

If I could find another OS that give me the same ability to do stuff that OS X does, and it was more open and developer/me friendly, I would switch in a heartbeat. Things that my Mac + OS X gives me, that other I have not found anywhere is includes 10+ hour battery with excellent power-tooling, excellent hardware design that is robust, nice looking and feeling, a desktop environment that works for the most part and lets me work on my software without getting in the way, while still being top notch when it comes to quality of bundled software, graphics and such.

KirinDave 11y ago
> If I could find another OS that give me the same ability to do stuff that OS X does, and it was more open and developer/me friendly, I would switch in a heartbeat. I am using Windows 10 on a surface book. There are some minor glitches in a 1st gen product I admit wholeheartedly. Most are fixed for me. I had a defective unit off lot 0 but the replacement and recent driver updates have fixed everything but the "sometimes my mouse goes away" and "sometimes my screen pauses as the driver freaks out". Both are minor and correctible annoyances that are well known. The Surface book gives me 7-8 hours of battery life doing Clojure development with deploy cycles with casual use, with audio streaming and bluetooth headphones. This eclipses my i7 OSX boxes, current gen, that typically conk out around 5 hours in the same config. The SB has a funny behavior though, it does connected standby like a tablet. It'll hibernate, but the default is after 2 hours of standby. So you need to know that a bit of your battery life is being used there. I highly recommend the surface book, unless you're an iOS developer. Otherwise, your tools are universal. What I need is there: Docker support is handled via identical (or superior) mechanisms to what we do on OSX; X11 apps are supported about as well; you can get access to the tools you need but PowerShell is actually very whiz-bang and advanced once you see it for what it is; the security model is better than OSX; and honestly I like Win10 better than OSX, which feels incredibly dated by comparison.
- vox_mollis 11y ago
  This sounds great, except some of us are wary about using an OS with a built-in keylogger and ambient sound recorder.