5 ms·
This is bad science. You compared the thing you had to the thing you wanted, and found a reason to pick the thing you wanted. Honesty should have compelled you
by db48x 3y ago
This is bad science. You compared the thing you had to the thing you wanted, and found a reason to pick the thing you wanted. Honesty should have compelled you to at least compare against a desktop–class machine, or even a workstation with a Threadripper CPU. Since you know that at least part of your workload is concurrent, and 14 CPUs are better than 10, why not check to see if 16, 32, or 64 is better still? And the linker is memory bound, so it is worth considering not just the quantity of memory but the actual memory bandwidth and latency as well.
- danhau 3y agoI don‘t think this is bad science at all. From the article: > All incident.io developers are given a MacBook which they use for their development work. Non-MacBook machines are apparently not an option, for whatever reason. Comparing against other machines would be interesting, but irrelevant.
- db48x 3y agoSo it’s ok for science to be limited by politics?
- p_j_w 3y agoThey’re looking at their particular use case. That may limit the applicability of this to other people or companies, but that doesn’t make it politics.
- db48x 3y agoWhen your CEO decides that your company will only buy Apple laptops, that is definitely a political football. Your CEO likes shiny things, and is willing to purchase the shiniest of them without regard to effectiveness or cost.
- minimaul 3y agoBeing Mac only can be an advantage - I’ve been on both sides of trying to maintain & use non-trivial dev environments and the more OSes you bring in for people to work on, the harder it gets. Bringing in Windows or Linux has a set up cost and a maintenance cost that may exclude it from even being considered. Edit: plus, Macs are ARM, other options are inevitably x86. So it’s also two CPU architectures to maintain support for, on top of OS specific quirks - and even if you use eg Docker, you still have a lot of OS specific quirks in play :/
- smoldesu 3y agoMy biggest issue with Mac-only shops is that almost nobody actually deploys to Mac. The majority of Mac-only firms I've worked at deploy to x86 Linux and develop in a VM on their Macbook (even pre-M1). Unless your business is writing Mac-native apps, MacOS is probably going to be a second-class deployment platform for you. Even in an ideal scenario where your app already works on ARM, you will be dealing with OS-specific quirks unless your production machine runs MacOS.
- minimaul 3y agoThese are fair points, and definitely a rough spot. Eg at work we use M1/M2 macs and dev on those using docker - so that’s a Linux VM essentially with some nice tooling wrapped around it. We certainly see differences - mostly around permissions (as docker for Mac doesn’t really enforce any access checks on files on the host), but we also mostly deploy to ARM Linux on AWS. We went Mac only from a mix of Linux, Windows and Mac as we found the least overall friction there for our developers - Windows, even with WSL, had lots of problems, including performance issues. Linux we had issues finding nice laptops, and more support issues (developers are often not *nix experts!). Mac was a nice middle ground in the end.
- db48x 3y ago> Linux we had issues finding nice laptops This is the same issue as before. Laptops are shiny so people don’t even bother considering a regular desktop machine. And yet desktops can be so much more powerful simply because they don’t have the thermal and power delivery restrictions that desktops have.