14 ms·

An M1 for Curl

lukeh 4y ago
Apple gave me a G4 once when I was contributing to Darwin but, that was a long time ago and the culture may have changed. However I suspect if you had an existing relationship with an engineer there, they'd throw some surplus hardware your way.
sleepychu 4y ago
Can anyone think of the reason Apple wouldn't provide hardware support to curl and similar projects? To my mind "this dev tool doesn't work, only on Apple, only on Apple's flagship chips" is the opposite of what they'd like to see happen.
- etchalon 4y ago
  There's no good reason beyond, "Apple doesn't do that, and never has."
- thisarticle 4y ago
  The logistics I imagine of doing so for projects would be immense. For ten projects, maybe it wouldn’t be bad, but which ten? Etc.
  - albertopv 4y ago
    Apple could just donate a coupon or something like that.
  - johannes1234321 4y ago
    Assuming they do proper due diligence and third party tracking just search the database for the ten libraries they use in the most places themselves ... and yes, that will need some time to coordinate, for identifying the right people in the open source project. But as they certainly depend on quite a few good relations is also in their interest to deal with security issues.
  - prmoustache 4y ago
    Hmmm I believe Apple must have datacenter full of m1 powered machines for their CI/CD farm. Sending individual devices to individual developers working for n projects might be complicated, however offering a CI/CD environment to projects with ssh access to test virtual machines shouldn't be too complicated for them provided they were ideologically willing to help and cooperate the open source world.
  - flohofwoe 4y ago
    Curl ships preinstalled on macOS, supporting such preinstalled tools would be a good start (I would hope that Apple has a list somewhere of all the OSS tools they are shipping with macOS).
    - saagarjha 4y ago
      https://opensource.apple.com/releases/ https://opensource.apple.com/releases/
  - Gigachad 4y ago
    Yeah my guess is they just don’t have a process for this. Sure, sending a MacBook to the devs of curl probably makes sense and costs virtually nothing. But everyone writing open source is going to want one next so you need some full process to approve requests.
- belfalas 4y ago
  For 20 years they’ve gotten it for free. Why start paying now? Apple is not a friend to the little guy, quite the opposite. Remember, Steve Jobs was good friends with Larry Ellison who famously said that open source is there to be exploited. These guys all think the same way.
  - nickpp 4y ago
    Wasn’t it offered for free?! Or was something asking in exchange? There are plenty of licenses which are free only for non-commercial use. The author choose the “free for all” license for a reason though.
    - lapcat 4y ago
      This is missing the point and focusing on the 1st paragraph of the article. 2nd paragraph: > Yet, there are many curl users on the different Apple platforms and sometimes these users run into issues that are unique to those platforms and are challenging to address without direct access to such. In other words, it's to Apple's own detriment if the author of curl doesn't have access to Apple hardware. curl is offered for free, and the consequence of that is the author of curl is under no obligation to support Apple platforms or shell out money for Apple hardware.
      - sbuk 4y ago
        So change the license or stop supporting Apple OS's. Or ask them, or the community for a donation.
        lapcat 4y ago
        > Or ask them, or the community for a donation. First sentence of the article: "A generous member of the wider curl community stepped up and donated an unused Mac mini m1 model to me to be used for curl development."
        sbuk 4y ago
- niklasmerz 4y ago
  Same goes for Apache Cordova a framework for building mobile apps for Android and iOS. Apple knows a big chunk of apps in the App Store are using it. You can only use it for iOS apps if you have Apple hardware. I am one of the maintainers and thankfully I got a Mac Mini donated as well when I lost my company Mac.
  - sroussey 4y ago
    Thank you for your work on Cordova. Have you also worked on Capacitor?
  - smugma 4y ago
    Apple would rather you build native apps, not cross platform ones.
- varispeed 4y ago
  They probably don't want to set up a precedent and that would be against the true spirit of open source - to get people writing software for free, so big corporations can save on R&D and employment costs, while making a ton of money.
- frou_dh 4y ago
  IIRC, at least around the time Apple Silicon was introduced, they were running some kind of taskforce to make code contributions to key open source projects to ensure they were compatible.
  - glandium 4y ago
    Did they? They provided pre-M1 mac minis (aka DTK), but I don't know that they actively contributed code. I don't remember seeing code from them for Firefox, at least (I was involved in getting Firefox to work on Apple Silicon)
    - danbulant 4y ago
      They did for obs[0], didn't see any other projects (I just remember I saw it a while ago, I may have missed other software if they tried). [0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30112595 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30112595
      - saagarjha 4y ago
        A handful received support. I think Mono got a PR too.
- alkonaut 4y ago
  Any of us working in an enterprise can probably relate to this similar thing: If I want to purchase a $500 piece of software, that’s a five minute conversation with my manager. If I wanted to donate $50 to a single person who has developed a critical bit of open source we as a company gas relied on for ten years, it would be a major hassle.
  - carstenhag 4y ago
    Nah, even purchasing a 500€/$ piece of anything involves a lot of talking, procurement and waiting. At least in most german companies.
    - chaosite 4y ago
      Sure, but even in German companies if you want to purchase a 500€ piece of software there's a procurement process that you can go through. There's no process for buying a laptop for an open-source dev who's code the business depends on but who is not an employee, so especially in German companies, you don't do that.
      - raverbashing 4y ago
        Well, correct, you wouldn't buy it for a donation You would usually proceed as a donation from inventory or you'd give them some type of credit for purchase (might come off the marketing dept) When donating something never go with the more expensive option (in this case, actually going and buying something you make on the market)
      - andsoitis 4y ago
        Can’t you donate the money and then they buy the hardware?
        95014_refugee 4y ago
        If by "you" you mean "the corporation", then no. A software BU doesn't make donations. It can purchase things, which is the point of the quoted comment, but it can't just give money away. From a corporate accounting perspective, a "purchase" is "we pay money and we get a thing". Sometimes the thing needs to fit a stereotype; "a hardware", "a service", "a contract", but the dance is the same; request a quote, get a quote, place an order, get an invoice, pay the invoice, get a receipt, get confirmation of delivery. Iff the transaction fits that mold, then it's generally straightforward. If it doesn't, then you need to find someone with the power to override the organisation; in an organisation resistant to internal tampering ("corruption") that can be quite difficult.
- fweimer 4y ago
  Apple has proprietary, in-house solutions for these tasks. If I were an employee working on one of those, I wouldn't like if a different part of the company provided support to or funding for an alternative to the thing I'm working on.
  - nisegami 4y ago
    Then they should ship those solutions with their products and provide support for it to end users instead of pawning them off to the curl team for support.
    - fweimer 4y ago
      They do? https://developer.apple.com/library/archive/documentation/NetworkingInternetWeb/Conceptual/NetworkingOverview/WorkingWithHTTPAndHTTPSRequests/WorkingWithHTTPAndHTTPSRequests.html https://developer.apple.com/library/archive/documentation/Ne... But it's a big company, so presumably some team used curl for some project, leaked that in an error message, and whoever runs the Apple Support social media account apparently didn't know about that after someone contacted them about the error message. Or something like that, it's hard to figure out what was going on without more context.
      - berkut 4y ago
        curl is shipped (by Apple) as a command line tool and libs to link against on stock MacOS (unless Xcode installs it these days, but I don't think so?).
- gregoriol 4y ago
  Apple would more likely develop their own similar code instead.
- amelius 4y ago
  Well they get great publicity from all the "Now available on M1 too!" posts on HN.
- Teever 4y ago
  Bexause they don't want to. its that simple. Any time you see a behemoth like Apple not doing something it's because they don't want to. They don't consider whatever gains they get from it to be worth the time and money.
Rebelgecko 4y ago
I'm surprised the performance stats weren't more dramatic. Is the compilation not taking advantage of multiple cores? Or for this task is the m1 really do comparable to an Intel 3rd gen cpu?
- dijit 4y ago
  Honestly those numbers are miserable and not in-line with what I have experienced with M1 (or M2). The numbers make me think it's using the 'efficiency' cores, or might indicate a lot of memory pressure issues (which seems unlikely at 16GiB) There's a better write-up about compilation performance here: https://build2.org/blog/apple-m1-compilation.xhtml https://build2.org/blog/apple-m1-compilation.xhtml For macOS there is a `taskpolicy` command to set the usage of efficiency and high performance cores. I'd expect that it's using high performance cores by default but you can force it by running `taskpolicy -c utility <program>`. You can also force it to be run on efficiency cores by running `taskpolicy -c background <program>`
- fabioborellini 4y ago
  M1 is particularly spectacular when compared to other chips with similar thermal characteristics. i7-3770K has TDP of 77 W, without a GPU, so it has 7-8 times the power budget of M1 for the CPU. In raw performance, M1 cannot match workstation-class CPUs. Since Apple was almost exclusively offering only ultra-mobile Intel chips with horribly dated GPUs, M1 was a giant leap in their offering, but in the desktop PC market there are more powerful chips available. And even some old ones can perform quite well.
  - dijit 4y ago
    I don't even think it's as cut and dry as all that. I have an M2 Macbook air (IE; fanless little thing) but it completely desicrates the memory of its predecessor (Precision 5520 w/ Xeon E3-1505m v6) which has a 45W TDP.. (IE. double and a bit). In single core it continues to readily beat my Theadripper 3970x workstation which has a 280W TDP... (more than 12x the TDP of the M2, though it definitely beats it in multi-core...) I think something else is at play here. Be it a terrible filesystem or (as mentioned in another comment: the use of efficiency cores for compilation).
magicloop 4y ago
Since the author mentions there are many users of curl on Apple platforms, there should be a pool of engineers from which a volunteer could be found to help out. The author didn't mention reaching out to Apple for help? My opinion is if Apple documentation call out the use of curl as part of a workflow or enabling step, or actually as part of a product, then there is a moral duty to help out (not a legal or license duty). I would prefer to see the big tech companies contribute to a foundation who could redistribute funds to key open source groups. A credit for a cloud instance of the machine would be sufficient in most cases. It would also remove undue influence of one vendor over another. Maybe such a thing exists, and I would welcome if someone pointed it out.
- traceroute66 4y ago
  > then there is a moral duty to help out (not a legal or license duty). May I invite you to descend off that hobby horse for a moment ? Let us perhaps replace the word "Apple" with a variable parameter, say, $VERY_LARGE_CORPORATION Lets say you turn up at said $VERY_LARGE_CORPORATION and start talking to them about something wishy-washy, intangible and wholly subjective such as a "moral duty". You will be laughed out of the room. Once a company grows to a size where employees are measured in the tens or hundreds of thousands then it is simply impossible to get involved in edge-cases and subjective matters. Everything has to be defined and measurable because otherwise the whole caboodle descends into utter chaos very quickly.
  - nine_k 4y ago
    Well, ignore "moral duty", it's just not a notion expressible in corp-speak. Take "good PR"; it's readily understandable. Why won't Apple, or any other company that won't mind spending $2k on good PR among the IT crowd, pick up the lead? Any PR department worth their free lattes should.
  - viraptor 4y ago
    > You will be laughed out of the room. Let me introduce you to the group of companies that belong to https://www.bcorporation.net/ https://www.bcorporation.net/ They very much care about things like "moral duty". And there's more of those that aren't officially certified members.
mittermayr 4y ago
I am always amazed at the generosity of some people who use free/open-source software. It definitely makes me want to try and become more supportive to such efforts myself. I make a (closed-source but completely free/ad-free) minimal macOS app for Hue, and every other day (sometimes a week goes by) I get a lovely price-of-a-coffee-sized donation from someone in the community. And when I ask for their name to include them in a credits or supporters panel, most don't even want me to mention it or credit them. One time, I struggled to replicate an issue for which I didn't have the necessary hardware (multiple Hue bridges), and the bug reporter simply offered to buy and send me "a bunch of bridges and lights" to make debugging easier. I couldn't accept it, but it's gestures like that, combined with positive feedback from people wanting the project to keep going and succeed, that are such a tremendous motivational driver for working on "free stuff". I had totally underestimated that (coming from the SaaS side).
- roel_v 4y ago
  "I couldn't accept it" Why not?
  - lionkor 4y ago
    Probably because its too much - I struggle to accept donations on my project as well, especially when theyre larger than price-of-a-coffee.
    - pifm_guy 4y ago
      Accepting a large donation but then not having any free time to work on the project (eg. Due to family or other commitments) feels very dishonest. So I only accept substantial donations if I'm very sure I'm going to be able to do a substantial amount of work on the project going forward.
      - tux 4y ago
        I actually have different experience, I spend all my time on projects but see very few donations :) But thank you to all who donate to open source and other projects.
zcbenz 4y ago
I have no relationship with Apple, but from my experience, the usual way big corp contributes to open source is to have their engineers sending patches, instead of sponsoring money/hardware directly. For example Apple sent patches to some open source projects to add support for Apple Silicon: https://twitter.com/markvillacampa/status/1275200446764912643 https://twitter.com/markvillacampa/status/127520044676491264...
- Jnr 4y ago
  That is great, but what if the maintainer wants to test those patches before merging? :)
  - halJordan 4y ago
    Reject the patch until has testing results
zimbatm 4y ago
Are there any places where Apple contributes back to the open source ecosystem? Their engineers are prohibited from contributing back to the ecosystem so it's not possible to engage with them in a reasonable manner. They don't acknowledge popular open source projects. Is it too much to ask to even have a single engineer talk to popular projects like Homebrew? They make us pay to build on their platforms. CI is more expensive, harder to get access to. Emulation is prohibited. Everywhere I look, it looks like they are a negative force. Sucking out good will and not giving anything back.
- voytec 4y ago
  > Are there any places where Apple contributes back to the open source ecosystem? They've donated $1,000–$4,999 to The FreeBSD Foundation this year[1] :-) [1] https://freebsdfoundation.org/our-donors/donors/?donationType=individual&donationYear=2022 https://freebsdfoundation.org/our-donors/donors/?donationTyp...
  - Schattenbaer 4y ago
    I'm glad they donated. The amount is a lot less than I expected, given the size of Apple's pockets.
    - npretto 4y ago
      It could be that the donation comes from matching the donations of some employees, or similar programs.
    - pifm_guy 4y ago
      I assume this kind of small donation is usually in return for some favor. Ie. Can you help debug and fix this bug. It looks like about 2 days work, so we'll donate $2000.
    - evilduck 4y ago
      4,999 is also just at the upper limit most mid tier managers are allowed to spend without getting an approval process involved.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
IshKebab 4y ago
> Apple has shipped and used curl in their products for twenty years but they never assist, help or otherwise contribute to the development. They also don’t sponsor us in any way, like with hardware. Do they have an obligation to? Even a moral one? Honestly I don't think (I hope!) Apple actually uses curl in their products (probably a good thing). It's just provided as a convenience to developers who might be used to it. I got curious about Apple's use of Curl and Googled it. One of the top hits was another blog post complaining about Apple not donating Macs: https://daniel.haxx.se/blog/2021/09/25/curls-first-twenty-years-on-the-mac/ https://daniel.haxx.se/blog/2021/09/25/curls-first-twenty-ye... I think you could replace 99% of the uses of Curl (download one file via HTTPS) with like 100 lines of Python or Rust or Go. It's not critical infrastructure in the same way that OpenSSL or LLVM or WebKit are.
- cokeandpepsi 4y ago
  > It's not critical infrastructure in the same way that OpenSSL or LLVM or WebKit are. libcurl is for sure
  - IshKebab 4y ago
    It's not. The main application of libcurl could be very easily replaced. Just because it is widely used (assuming it is) doesn't mean it is valuable. You wouldn't say `ls` is critical infrastructure.
    - yjftsjthsd-h 4y ago
      I would absolutely call coreutils critical.
      - IshKebab 4y ago
        Ok maybe "critical" doesn't convey what I mean. What I mean is it's not something that would be difficult to replace. It's like... you might use your phone's timer app all the time. But if it suddenly started nagging you for donations all the time you aren't going to donate; you'd just switch to a different timer app. It isn't uniquely valuable.
caseysoftware 4y ago
If you're looking to support open source projects, Open Collective has a workable model: https://opencollective.com/curl https://opencollective.com/curl If you want your employer to contribute, check your expense policy. Most companies have a threshold below which you don't need a receipt or even explicit approval. At my last company, that was $50 so I convinced Daniel (of curl) to add a $25/month level specifically to take advantage of it. :)
- wink 4y ago
  "Most companies". I've never even heard of such a thing.
ApolloVonZ 4y ago
I’d like to post the Apple GitHub account where you can find quite a few repositories Apple is developing open source for not only Apple platforms. They even just announced that the new Swift native Foundation framework will be completely open source. I think that’s pretty significant. https://github.com/apple https://github.com/apple
- icco 4y ago
  While this is great, there are so many more FOSS projects that OSX relies on that Apple doesn't support in any way.
- b3morales 4y ago
  Look, I happily make my living on Apple's platforms, and I like their tech, but their "open source" stuff is a farce. They maintain private forks of pretty much everything for Darwin. Previous discussion here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29494808 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29494808
binarymax 4y ago
“I expected the differences to be bigger” is some serious shade!
burmanm 4y ago
The most amazing thing in that article is: "The source code is stored on an OCZ-VERTEX4 SSD on the Intel," That must be the only surviving OCZ Vertex4 in existence.

Apple gave me a G4 once when I was contributing to Darwin but, that was a long time ago and the culture may have changed. However I suspect if you had an existing relationship with an engineer there, they'd throw some surplus hardware your way.

sleepychu 4y ago

Can anyone think of the reason Apple wouldn't provide hardware support to curl and similar projects? To my mind "this dev tool doesn't work, only on Apple, only on Apple's flagship chips" is the opposite of what they'd like to see happen.

etchalon 4y ago
There's no good reason beyond, "Apple doesn't do that, and never has."
thisarticle 4y ago
The logistics I imagine of doing so for projects would be immense. For ten projects, maybe it wouldn’t be bad, but which ten? Etc.
- albertopv 4y ago
  Apple could just donate a coupon or something like that.
- johannes1234321 4y ago
  Assuming they do proper due diligence and third party tracking just search the database for the ten libraries they use in the most places themselves ... and yes, that will need some time to coordinate, for identifying the right people in the open source project. But as they certainly depend on quite a few good relations is also in their interest to deal with security issues.
- prmoustache 4y ago
  Hmmm I believe Apple must have datacenter full of m1 powered machines for their CI/CD farm. Sending individual devices to individual developers working for n projects might be complicated, however offering a CI/CD environment to projects with ssh access to test virtual machines shouldn't be too complicated for them provided they were ideologically willing to help and cooperate the open source world.
- flohofwoe 4y ago
  Curl ships preinstalled on macOS, supporting such preinstalled tools would be a good start (I would hope that Apple has a list somewhere of all the OSS tools they are shipping with macOS).
  - saagarjha 4y ago
    https://opensource.apple.com/releases/ https://opensource.apple.com/releases/
- Gigachad 4y ago
  Yeah my guess is they just don’t have a process for this. Sure, sending a MacBook to the devs of curl probably makes sense and costs virtually nothing. But everyone writing open source is going to want one next so you need some full process to approve requests.
belfalas 4y ago
For 20 years they’ve gotten it for free. Why start paying now? Apple is not a friend to the little guy, quite the opposite. Remember, Steve Jobs was good friends with Larry Ellison who famously said that open source is there to be exploited. These guys all think the same way.
- nickpp 4y ago
  Wasn’t it offered for free?! Or was something asking in exchange? There are plenty of licenses which are free only for non-commercial use. The author choose the “free for all” license for a reason though.
  - lapcat 4y ago
    This is missing the point and focusing on the 1st paragraph of the article. 2nd paragraph: > Yet, there are many curl users on the different Apple platforms and sometimes these users run into issues that are unique to those platforms and are challenging to address without direct access to such. In other words, it's to Apple's own detriment if the author of curl doesn't have access to Apple hardware. curl is offered for free, and the consequence of that is the author of curl is under no obligation to support Apple platforms or shell out money for Apple hardware.
    - sbuk 4y ago
      So change the license or stop supporting Apple OS's. Or ask them, or the community for a donation.
      - lapcat 4y ago
        > Or ask them, or the community for a donation. First sentence of the article: "A generous member of the wider curl community stepped up and donated an unused Mac mini m1 model to me to be used for curl development."
        sbuk 4y ago
niklasmerz 4y ago
Same goes for Apache Cordova a framework for building mobile apps for Android and iOS. Apple knows a big chunk of apps in the App Store are using it. You can only use it for iOS apps if you have Apple hardware. I am one of the maintainers and thankfully I got a Mac Mini donated as well when I lost my company Mac.
- sroussey 4y ago
  Thank you for your work on Cordova. Have you also worked on Capacitor?
- smugma 4y ago
  Apple would rather you build native apps, not cross platform ones.
varispeed 4y ago
They probably don't want to set up a precedent and that would be against the true spirit of open source - to get people writing software for free, so big corporations can save on R&D and employment costs, while making a ton of money.
frou_dh 4y ago
IIRC, at least around the time Apple Silicon was introduced, they were running some kind of taskforce to make code contributions to key open source projects to ensure they were compatible.
- glandium 4y ago
  Did they? They provided pre-M1 mac minis (aka DTK), but I don't know that they actively contributed code. I don't remember seeing code from them for Firefox, at least (I was involved in getting Firefox to work on Apple Silicon)
  - danbulant 4y ago
    They did for obs[0], didn't see any other projects (I just remember I saw it a while ago, I may have missed other software if they tried). [0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30112595 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30112595
    - saagarjha 4y ago
      A handful received support. I think Mono got a PR too.
alkonaut 4y ago
Any of us working in an enterprise can probably relate to this similar thing: If I want to purchase a $500 piece of software, that’s a five minute conversation with my manager. If I wanted to donate $50 to a single person who has developed a critical bit of open source we as a company gas relied on for ten years, it would be a major hassle.
- carstenhag 4y ago
  Nah, even purchasing a 500€/$ piece of anything involves a lot of talking, procurement and waiting. At least in most german companies.
  - chaosite 4y ago
    Sure, but even in German companies if you want to purchase a 500€ piece of software there's a procurement process that you can go through. There's no process for buying a laptop for an open-source dev who's code the business depends on but who is not an employee, so especially in German companies, you don't do that.
    - raverbashing 4y ago
      Well, correct, you wouldn't buy it for a donation You would usually proceed as a donation from inventory or you'd give them some type of credit for purchase (might come off the marketing dept) When donating something never go with the more expensive option (in this case, actually going and buying something you make on the market)
    - andsoitis 4y ago
      Can’t you donate the money and then they buy the hardware?
      - 95014_refugee 4y ago
        If by "you" you mean "the corporation", then no. A software BU doesn't make donations. It can purchase things, which is the point of the quoted comment, but it can't just give money away. From a corporate accounting perspective, a "purchase" is "we pay money and we get a thing". Sometimes the thing needs to fit a stereotype; "a hardware", "a service", "a contract", but the dance is the same; request a quote, get a quote, place an order, get an invoice, pay the invoice, get a receipt, get confirmation of delivery. Iff the transaction fits that mold, then it's generally straightforward. If it doesn't, then you need to find someone with the power to override the organisation; in an organisation resistant to internal tampering ("corruption") that can be quite difficult.
fweimer 4y ago
Apple has proprietary, in-house solutions for these tasks. If I were an employee working on one of those, I wouldn't like if a different part of the company provided support to or funding for an alternative to the thing I'm working on.
- nisegami 4y ago
  Then they should ship those solutions with their products and provide support for it to end users instead of pawning them off to the curl team for support.
  - fweimer 4y ago
    They do? https://developer.apple.com/library/archive/documentation/NetworkingInternetWeb/Conceptual/NetworkingOverview/WorkingWithHTTPAndHTTPSRequests/WorkingWithHTTPAndHTTPSRequests.html https://developer.apple.com/library/archive/documentation/Ne... But it's a big company, so presumably some team used curl for some project, leaked that in an error message, and whoever runs the Apple Support social media account apparently didn't know about that after someone contacted them about the error message. Or something like that, it's hard to figure out what was going on without more context.
    - berkut 4y ago
      curl is shipped (by Apple) as a command line tool and libs to link against on stock MacOS (unless Xcode installs it these days, but I don't think so?).
gregoriol 4y ago
Apple would more likely develop their own similar code instead.
amelius 4y ago
Well they get great publicity from all the "Now available on M1 too!" posts on HN.
Teever 4y ago
Bexause they don't want to. its that simple. Any time you see a behemoth like Apple not doing something it's because they don't want to. They don't consider whatever gains they get from it to be worth the time and money.

Rebelgecko 4y ago

I'm surprised the performance stats weren't more dramatic. Is the compilation not taking advantage of multiple cores? Or for this task is the m1 really do comparable to an Intel 3rd gen cpu?

dijit 4y ago
Honestly those numbers are miserable and not in-line with what I have experienced with M1 (or M2). The numbers make me think it's using the 'efficiency' cores, or might indicate a lot of memory pressure issues (which seems unlikely at 16GiB) There's a better write-up about compilation performance here: https://build2.org/blog/apple-m1-compilation.xhtml https://build2.org/blog/apple-m1-compilation.xhtml For macOS there is a `taskpolicy` command to set the usage of efficiency and high performance cores. I'd expect that it's using high performance cores by default but you can force it by running `taskpolicy -c utility <program>`. You can also force it to be run on efficiency cores by running `taskpolicy -c background <program>`
fabioborellini 4y ago
M1 is particularly spectacular when compared to other chips with similar thermal characteristics. i7-3770K has TDP of 77 W, without a GPU, so it has 7-8 times the power budget of M1 for the CPU. In raw performance, M1 cannot match workstation-class CPUs. Since Apple was almost exclusively offering only ultra-mobile Intel chips with horribly dated GPUs, M1 was a giant leap in their offering, but in the desktop PC market there are more powerful chips available. And even some old ones can perform quite well.
- dijit 4y ago
  I don't even think it's as cut and dry as all that. I have an M2 Macbook air (IE; fanless little thing) but it completely desicrates the memory of its predecessor (Precision 5520 w/ Xeon E3-1505m v6) which has a 45W TDP.. (IE. double and a bit). In single core it continues to readily beat my Theadripper 3970x workstation which has a 280W TDP... (more than 12x the TDP of the M2, though it definitely beats it in multi-core...) I think something else is at play here. Be it a terrible filesystem or (as mentioned in another comment: the use of efficiency cores for compilation).

magicloop 4y ago

Since the author mentions there are many users of curl on Apple platforms, there should be a pool of engineers from which a volunteer could be found to help out. The author didn't mention reaching out to Apple for help? My opinion is if Apple documentation call out the use of curl as part of a workflow or enabling step, or actually as part of a product, then there is a moral duty to help out (not a legal or license duty). I would prefer to see the big tech companies contribute to a foundation who could redistribute funds to key open source groups. A credit for a cloud instance of the machine would be sufficient in most cases. It would also remove undue influence of one vendor over another. Maybe such a thing exists, and I would welcome if someone pointed it out.

traceroute66 4y ago
> then there is a moral duty to help out (not a legal or license duty). May I invite you to descend off that hobby horse for a moment ? Let us perhaps replace the word "Apple" with a variable parameter, say, $VERY_LARGE_CORPORATION Lets say you turn up at said $VERY_LARGE_CORPORATION and start talking to them about something wishy-washy, intangible and wholly subjective such as a "moral duty". You will be laughed out of the room. Once a company grows to a size where employees are measured in the tens or hundreds of thousands then it is simply impossible to get involved in edge-cases and subjective matters. Everything has to be defined and measurable because otherwise the whole caboodle descends into utter chaos very quickly.
- nine_k 4y ago
  Well, ignore "moral duty", it's just not a notion expressible in corp-speak. Take "good PR"; it's readily understandable. Why won't Apple, or any other company that won't mind spending $2k on good PR among the IT crowd, pick up the lead? Any PR department worth their free lattes should.
- viraptor 4y ago
  > You will be laughed out of the room. Let me introduce you to the group of companies that belong to https://www.bcorporation.net/ https://www.bcorporation.net/ They very much care about things like "moral duty". And there's more of those that aren't officially certified members.

mittermayr 4y ago

I am always amazed at the generosity of some people who use free/open-source software. It definitely makes me want to try and become more supportive to such efforts myself. I make a (closed-source but completely free/ad-free) minimal macOS app for Hue, and every other day (sometimes a week goes by) I get a lovely price-of-a-coffee-sized donation from someone in the community. And when I ask for their name to include them in a credits or supporters panel, most don't even want me to mention it or credit them. One time, I struggled to replicate an issue for which I didn't have the necessary hardware (multiple Hue bridges), and the bug reporter simply offered to buy and send me "a bunch of bridges and lights" to make debugging easier. I couldn't accept it, but it's gestures like that, combined with positive feedback from people wanting the project to keep going and succeed, that are such a tremendous motivational driver for working on "free stuff". I had totally underestimated that (coming from the SaaS side).

roel_v 4y ago
"I couldn't accept it" Why not?
- lionkor 4y ago
  Probably because its too much - I struggle to accept donations on my project as well, especially when theyre larger than price-of-a-coffee.
  - pifm_guy 4y ago
    Accepting a large donation but then not having any free time to work on the project (eg. Due to family or other commitments) feels very dishonest. So I only accept substantial donations if I'm very sure I'm going to be able to do a substantial amount of work on the project going forward.
    - tux 4y ago
      I actually have different experience, I spend all my time on projects but see very few donations :) But thank you to all who donate to open source and other projects.

zcbenz 4y ago

I have no relationship with Apple, but from my experience, the usual way big corp contributes to open source is to have their engineers sending patches, instead of sponsoring money/hardware directly. For example Apple sent patches to some open source projects to add support for Apple Silicon: https://twitter.com/markvillacampa/status/1275200446764912643 https://twitter.com/markvillacampa/status/127520044676491264...

Jnr 4y ago
That is great, but what if the maintainer wants to test those patches before merging? :)
- halJordan 4y ago
  Reject the patch until has testing results

zimbatm 4y ago

Are there any places where Apple contributes back to the open source ecosystem? Their engineers are prohibited from contributing back to the ecosystem so it's not possible to engage with them in a reasonable manner. They don't acknowledge popular open source projects. Is it too much to ask to even have a single engineer talk to popular projects like Homebrew? They make us pay to build on their platforms. CI is more expensive, harder to get access to. Emulation is prohibited. Everywhere I look, it looks like they are a negative force. Sucking out good will and not giving anything back.

voytec 4y ago
> Are there any places where Apple contributes back to the open source ecosystem? They've donated $1,000–$4,999 to The FreeBSD Foundation this year[1] :-) [1] https://freebsdfoundation.org/our-donors/donors/?donationType=individual&donationYear=2022 https://freebsdfoundation.org/our-donors/donors/?donationTyp...
- Schattenbaer 4y ago
  I'm glad they donated. The amount is a lot less than I expected, given the size of Apple's pockets.
  - npretto 4y ago
    It could be that the donation comes from matching the donations of some employees, or similar programs.
  - pifm_guy 4y ago
    I assume this kind of small donation is usually in return for some favor. Ie. Can you help debug and fix this bug. It looks like about 2 days work, so we'll donate $2000.
  - evilduck 4y ago
    4,999 is also just at the upper limit most mid tier managers are allowed to spend without getting an approval process involved.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

IshKebab 4y ago

> Apple has shipped and used curl in their products for twenty years but they never assist, help or otherwise contribute to the development. They also don’t sponsor us in any way, like with hardware. Do they have an obligation to? Even a moral one? Honestly I don't think (I hope!) Apple actually uses curl in their products (probably a good thing). It's just provided as a convenience to developers who might be used to it. I got curious about Apple's use of Curl and Googled it. One of the top hits was another blog post complaining about Apple not donating Macs: https://daniel.haxx.se/blog/2021/09/25/curls-first-twenty-years-on-the-mac/ https://daniel.haxx.se/blog/2021/09/25/curls-first-twenty-ye... I think you could replace 99% of the uses of Curl (download one file via HTTPS) with like 100 lines of Python or Rust or Go. It's not critical infrastructure in the same way that OpenSSL or LLVM or WebKit are.

cokeandpepsi 4y ago
> It's not critical infrastructure in the same way that OpenSSL or LLVM or WebKit are. libcurl is for sure
- IshKebab 4y ago
  It's not. The main application of libcurl could be very easily replaced. Just because it is widely used (assuming it is) doesn't mean it is valuable. You wouldn't say `ls` is critical infrastructure.
  - yjftsjthsd-h 4y ago
    I would absolutely call coreutils critical.
    - IshKebab 4y ago
      Ok maybe "critical" doesn't convey what I mean. What I mean is it's not something that would be difficult to replace. It's like... you might use your phone's timer app all the time. But if it suddenly started nagging you for donations all the time you aren't going to donate; you'd just switch to a different timer app. It isn't uniquely valuable.

caseysoftware 4y ago

If you're looking to support open source projects, Open Collective has a workable model: https://opencollective.com/curl https://opencollective.com/curl If you want your employer to contribute, check your expense policy. Most companies have a threshold below which you don't need a receipt or even explicit approval. At my last company, that was $50 so I convinced Daniel (of curl) to add a $25/month level specifically to take advantage of it. :)

wink 4y ago
"Most companies". I've never even heard of such a thing.

ApolloVonZ 4y ago

I’d like to post the Apple GitHub account where you can find quite a few repositories Apple is developing open source for not only Apple platforms. They even just announced that the new Swift native Foundation framework will be completely open source. I think that’s pretty significant. https://github.com/apple https://github.com/apple

icco 4y ago
While this is great, there are so many more FOSS projects that OSX relies on that Apple doesn't support in any way.
b3morales 4y ago
Look, I happily make my living on Apple's platforms, and I like their tech, but their "open source" stuff is a farce. They maintain private forks of pretty much everything for Darwin. Previous discussion here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29494808 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29494808

binarymax 4y ago

“I expected the differences to be bigger” is some serious shade!

burmanm 4y ago

The most amazing thing in that article is: "The source code is stored on an OCZ-VERTEX4 SSD on the Intel," That must be the only surviving OCZ Vertex4 in existence.