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Ask HN: Will upgrading make any difference for development with JavaScript?

1 points by yanis_t 7y ago

The majority of projects I work with use Webpack + babel or typescript or whatever. Basically there's some chain of tools and transformations, which update the browser when I do any change. On many of them the development is quite slow, so for example if I make a change in a file, then I have to wait like 4-5 seconds (an sometimes it can be worse) until I see the update in the browser... Anyway, my question is is it because the tools are slow or is my laptop is slow. In particular which parameters should help speeding this up. Is it RAM? SSD disk? CPU? P.S.: My working horse is early-2015 macbook pro 13 inches. I would happily upgrade to the fastest beast out there if I had a guarantee that it will speed up my flow significantly

mtmail 7y ago
While having faster CPU/RAM/SSD helps, I think the biggest impact is number of CPU cores. One core is dealing with desktop apps and the browser. I see your model seems to use a Intel Core i5-5257U which has two cores. I saw a huge jump in build scripts (not webpack but similar enough) when I upgraded to a 6 core MacMini compared to my laptop. 2019 models of 13 inch laptop have 4 cores, the 15 inch either 6 core or 8 core. (even iPhones have 8 cores now).