Beyond the M1 hype and why the fairy dust needs to settle.

[pmccumber]

Because of Powershell? Ok. You’re right. <sarcasm>Linux/Mac/Unix users are pining for that fantastic utility</sarcasm>.

somebody’s credibility is shot though

 

[m1maverick]

Because of Powershell? Ok. You’re right. <sarcasm>Linux/Mac/Unix users are pining for that fantastic utility</sarcasm>.

somebody’s credibility is shot though

You didn't say PowerShell, you said CMD. As such you are correct that your credibility is shot as a result.

 

[bobcomer]

vi

Anyone that says vi has got to be crazy, there are for more capable and easier to use text editors. I absolutely hated vi so much in college that I remoted into our VAX so i could use a real text editor.

;-) But I really did hate vi, and I'm not wild about any UNIX command line stuff, nor programming for X11.

Command line stuff has gotten a lot better on Windows, so much so you can easily run servers without the GUI.

 

[pmccumber]

Anyone that says vi has got to be crazy, there are for more capable and easier to use text editors. I absolutely hated vi so much in college that I remoted into our VAX so i could use a real text editor.

;-) But I really did hate vi, and I'm not wild about any UNIX command line stuff, nor programming for X11.

Command line stuff has gotten a lot better on Windows, so much so you can easily run servers without the GUI.

VMS was really nice. I loved that editor too. We had one for one year in college and then we became a BSD Beta user on that VAX. So Bill Joy (inventor of vi and porter of many BSD incarnations) is my hero. I’ve got vi muscle memory and regex ingrained since 1980.

And both of my children are Computer Scientists too. My son graduates in May. First thing he told his sister was “Bite the bullet and learn vi”. I will say I’ve worked with guys who are proficient with Windows editors and while their shortcuts are every bit as arcane as vi, those guys could fly.

My kids got me a bumper sticker that says “:w Saves” because it’s a running joke. I hear ya, I just disagree.

 

[cmaier]

I worked in Colorado in the embedded group from 2003-2007. Back then, the AMD64 was groundbreaking and even with a process disadvantage AMD was running circles around Intel and the Pentium 4. But, as soon as Core came out, AMD was doomed. I’m happy AMD has found it’s legs. I’m also happy Apple is moving us forward. This is the way markets are supposed to work. With Microsoft, Google, Amazon, and nVidia all developing their own CPUs, along with a healthy AMD and Apple, we are going to see some exciting things moving forward.

Funny. I don’t remember there being an embedded group in Colorado.

 

[cmaier]

VMS was really nice. I loved that editor too. We had one for one year in college and then we became a BSD Beta user on that VAX. So Bill Joy (inventor of vi and porter of many BSD incarnations) is my hero. I’ve got vi muscle memory and regex ingrained since 1980.

And both of my children are Computer Scientists too. My son graduates in May. First thing he told his sister was “Bite the bullet and learn vi”. I will say I’ve worked with guys who are proficient with Windows editors and while their shortcuts are every bit as arcane as vi, those guys could fly.

My kids got me a bumper sticker that says “:w Saves”

VMS commandline was a little verbose for my tastes. Though i enjoyed “purge”

 

[pmccumber]

You didn't say PowerShell, you said CMD. As such you are correct that your credibility is shot as

VMS commandline was a little verbose for my tastes. Though i enjoyed “purge

Funny. I don’t remember there being an embedded group in Colorado.

It was an offshoot of the Geode group.

 

[cmaier]

It was an offshoot of the Geode group.

I was in CMD from 1997 until the end of 2006. My only interaction with Colorado was that my boss’s boss, who I had never previously met because he was in Colorado, demanded I apologize to a guy in TMD for not doing his job for him. I told said Coloradan to go **** himself. Two weeks later I was out of there, and spent the next 2 months studying for the bar exam

 

[m1maverick]

It was an offshoot of the Geode group.

What does this have to do with my comment?

 

[pmccumber]

I was in CMD from 1997 until the end of 2006. My only interaction with Colorado was that my boss’s boss, who I had never previously met because he was in Colorado, demanded I apologize to a guy in TMD for not doing his job for him. I told said Coloradan to go **** himself. Two weeks later I was out of there, and spent the next 2 months studying for the bar exam

Gawd I wonder who that was? I was there then. There was a manager that worked there that is SO bad that I literally short every company he goes to.

 

[pmccumber]

What does this have to do with my comment?

Not a thing. I’m on my phone and meant to reply to someone else. Please forgive me for this transgression

 

[cmaier]

Gawd I wonder who that was? I was there then. There was a manager that worked there that is SO bad that I literally short every company he goes to.

I cannot even remember his name. I honestly don’t think I ever even heard of him until that phone call. The problem started because, at the time, i was the advanced development manager in CMD (I had a lot of roles at various times - circuits, logic, EDA, methodology, etc.). I had written EDA libraries to do circuit classification, parse SPICE, etc. At that point I was doing research, so my goal was to produce prototypes of libraries and tools, and pass them off to the EDA team to productize and support.

We used cvs, and I was pretty good about documenting, as part of each commit, exactly what I thought changed and why. I also had a suite of tests I’d run, but, again, I didn’t support end-user tools directly. This guy in Texas decided he would just take my code and incorporate it in his tools every time I committed, and then release it to the public without testing. Something broke in one of his tools, so he demanded that every time I commit, I run it by him first. Again, he was not even supposed to be using my prototyped code in production tools. I told him no. I recall emailing “dear god, what do you want from me?” after the back and forth continued.

Anyway, I was supposed to apologize. I think the Colorado guy was in charge of EDA somehow? It’s a little fuzzy, because I don’t recall exactly who I reported to at that point.

 

[pmccumber]

You didn't say PowerShell, you said CMD. As such you are correct that your credibility is shot as a result.

So, in Powershell can you install virtually any open source package, like gcc for example, and string commands together? No.

Now if I want to write .Net cmdlets and do Windows things, great. It’s still not a robust sw development environment for anything other than the Windows ecosystem.

 

[m1maverick]

So, in Powershell can you install virtually any open source package, like gcc for example, and string commands together? No.

Now if I want to write .Net cmdlets and do Windows things, great. It’s still not a robust sw development environment for anything other than the Windows ecosystem.

Again you didn't say PowerShell, you said CMD. If you had an issue with PowerShell why didn't you comment on PowerShell instead of CMD? Answer: You're not familiar with Windows to discuss something which has been available for 15 years. Now you're attempting to cover yourself by attacking PowerShell because it's not UNIX.

 

[theluggage]

So I got my second Masters in 2018 and I can tell you in the 3 years at The University of Colorado, I saw 100s of grad students and not a single one used Windows.

So? I've worked with postgrads from Arizona State and they all used Windows - even when using Mongo, MySQL, and some Java application server (I forget) for which, frankly, I'd have chosen Mac or Linux - but they were all available on Windows. I know several "software professionals" and they all use Windows. Meanwhile, my Gran used 60 pieces of anecdotal evidence a day, and she lived to be 106...

Pick any university/lab/workplace and it might turn out to be a Mac shop, a Linux shop or a Windows shop, probably based on the whim of the professor. Yes, Linux/Unix is popular for "scientific" applications, but not exclusively so and there are many other areas in which "software professionals" work.

Cygwin? C’mon, you know better. Just because you can grep or find doesn’t mean that it’s a real development environment that you can deploy as many compilers, cross compilers, versions of Python, etc. as you wish.

Er... we were talking about shells (you mentioned CMD) not package managers - PowerShell is its own thing, but if you're after a Unix-like experience, Cygwin would be the way to go and that does have a package manager - package list here: http://cygwin.com/packages/package_list.html. Is that enough versions of GCC and Python for you? Most of the "big name" open source packages have "native" (i.e. not depending on the Cygwin POSIX layer) Windows versions that you can just download and install like any Windows package. Or there are Windows-y package managers like Chocolatey (yeah, the name put me off at first, too)... NB: its not like Brew or Macports are official parts of MacOS, either...

I don't know what it is you think doesn't run on Windows... and there are plenty of ways to do things "old school" with makefiles and command lines (or whatever the build-tool-of-the-week is for web development...) if you want. That's not even getting started on what the new-ish Windows Subsystem for Linux can do.

And your point about containers is true. Absolutely. But that’s a workaround and we’re talking about the operating systems environments and what they offer sw developers themselves.

...but using containers/VMs is not just a workaround - in many cases its a better, more efficient way of doing the job, which makes the host OS more or less irrelevant - and its becoming more so: lots of interesting tools in VS Code now for "remote" development (where "remote" can be in a VM or container via ssh). Especially - as I said - when different projects are using different versions of packages, or need different server configurations. I can spin up a VM to be a near-as-damn match to the real target environment, down to the Linux distro & version, file ownerships, server configurations, external ports, permissions etc... and if power/ram/storage is an issue (it usually isn't) I can throw together a kick-ass headless Linux box from standard parts for a fraction of the cost of adding that capacity to a Mac, stick it out of the way somewhere and remote into it. C.f. Mac OS, where all your projects have to live together somehow, you need a rat's nest of symlinks to make them think they're sitting in /home or /usr/share or whatever and then deal with the 101 annoying differences between Mac's BSD-ish userland and Linux's GNU/SysV/whatever world.

Actually, if I were starting from scratch on a (funded) Linux-targetted web/server development project I'd seriously consider just spinning up a development server in the cloud - its the dev server that needs the nice fat pipe to the internet for downloading packages and stuff, its the dev server than needs a proper IP address so that others can test it & it can easily grab LetsEncrypt certs etc. The damp string to my house/workplace can keep up with my typing...

Maybe if MacOS had its own native container/sandboxing facility (...or, rather, had a frontend UI for the facilities that must already be in MacOS for app sandboxing)... but as it is, just like Windows, the first thing that any containerisation system has to do is spin up a Linux VM.

Please admit, for open software development, the universe that there is, by and large Windows is not usable or at least greatly diminished from MacOS/Linux/Unix.

It is most certainly usable. As I said, please elucidate on what you think is actually missing. Mac OS is a good system for development - but it's far from unassailable... and with Apple Silicon it has now lost the advantage of being able to virtualise/dual boot x86 OSs: I don't think that's as critical as some people think (just spin up a PC or x86 Linux instance in the cloud), but it is a lost advantage.

 

[pmccumber]

For the sake of argument, you think that even 10% of Computer Science students are doing development on Windows machines? My daughter goes to Santa Clara, huge CS department, and it’s 0%, my son is at Colorado State and it’s 0%, as it was for me at CU. Absolutely no one. And we hired an ASU grad from the old Williams AF base Polytechnic campus. Kid is a beast. He is a Mac bigot. I know it’s anecdotal except it’s not. I’ve tracked down enough Gang Of Four examples from universities to know they’re not assigning problems with Windows explanations.

I understand there are ways to work around Windows shortcomings. I understand you can download many of these packages as binaries. But when you see issues or howtos on StackOverflow, how often do you see them discussing the context in Windows parlance? I see it, but it’s notable as the exception.

Im not saying these are absolutes, I’m saying that MacOS is a substantially better platform for non Windows ecosystem sw development.

 

[JMacHack]

For the sake of argument, you think that even 10% of Computer Science students are doing development on Windows machines? My daughter goes to Santa Clara, huge CS department, and it’s 0%, my son is at Colorado State and it’s 0%, as it was for me at CU. Absolutely no one. And we hired an ASU grad from the old Williams AF base Polytechnic campus. Kid is a beast. He is a Mac bigot. I know it’s anecdotal except it’s not. I’ve tracked down enough Gang Of Four examples from universities to know they’re not assigning problems with Windows explanations.

It’s probably different in Cali, but my podunk midwestern university I’d say had 10-20% of kids using Windows in CS courses. It’s probably more common at less prestigious universities.

 

[m1maverick]

Er... we were talking about shells (you mentioned CMD) not package managers - PowerShell is its own thing, but if you're after a Unix-like experience, Cygwin would be the way to go and that does have a package manager - package list here: http://cygwin.com/packages/package_list.html. Is that enough versions of GCC and Python for you? Most of the "big name" open source packages have "native" (i.e. not depending on the Cygwin POSIX layer) Windows versions that you can just download and install like any Windows package. Or there are Windows-y package managers like Chocolatey (yeah, the name put me off at first, too)... NB: its not like Brew or Macports are official parts of MacOS, either...

He's clueless about Windows. He brings up CMD and then goes on to fault PowerShell because it's not UNIX. Furthermore he goes on to demonstrate his ignorance of PowerShell by claiming it's incapable of piping (er, I mean "stringing" ) commands together. He's completely ignorant about Windows.

 

[JMacHack]

If the perceived performance delta between Apple Silicon and Intel/AMD holds, we may not even need optimized games. The game will be able to execute any required translation layer on top of a highly optimized 64-bit system. Most games regarded as AAA are essentially just graphically impressive FPS’s anyway. There’s likely more than a few efficient ways to get those to run on multiple platforms.

Just thinking about this… the days of HIGHLY optimized games anywhere are likely gone. The end days of the Genesis where developers were wringing out every last bit of performance? If we see that again, it’ll be home brew if that’s allowed.

Thinking about this further, why are we even holding AAA gaming as some standard to aspire to? I keep seeing games like GTA5 (2013), CS:GO (2012), Skyrim (2011) pop up in benchmarks all the time and they’re nearly a decade old!

The latest games I’ve saw benchmarked is Cyberpunk 2077, and it’s an unfinished ********.

Looking at the most popular games on Steam, most are more than 5 years old. Notable exceptions being Apex Legends and Valheim. Most people aren’t even playing the ****ing “AAA benchmarks!”

Maybe I’m jaded but as far as I can tell the “Macs bad for gaming “ argument falls flat when people aren’t even playing new games that don’t run on Macs. The older games even have ports that run fine, even emulated on the M1 because they’re almost a decade old. It’s pure stupidity.

 

[Unregistered 4U]

Thinking about this further, why are we even holding AAA gaming as some standard to aspire to? I keep seeing games like GTA5 (2013), CS:GO (2012), Skyrim (2011) pop up in benchmarks all the time and they’re nearly a decade old!

And let’s not forget the current reigning champion, Minecraft I think GTA is getting closer to Minecraft’s sales by now, but still…

 

[satcomer]

Thinking about this further, why are we even holding AAA gaming as some standard to aspire to? I keep seeing games like GTA5 (2013), CS:GO (2012), Skyrim (2011) pop up in benchmarks all the time and they’re nearly a decade old!

The latest games I’ve saw benchmarked is Cyberpunk 2077, and it’s an unfinished ********.

Looking at the most popular games on Steam, most are more than 5 years old. Notable exceptions being Apex Legends and Valheim. Most people aren’t even playing the ****ing “AAA benchmarks!”

Maybe I’m jaded but as far as I can tell the “Macs bad for gaming “ argument falls flat when people aren’t even playing new games that don’t run on Macs. The older games even have ports that run fine, even emulated on the M1 because they’re almost a decade old. It’s pure stupidity.

Yea but why is so many Wintel machines so bad a music creation? See I that game too!

 

[ADGrant]

Slight addendum, WSL2 has near bare metal performance on the CPU (not sure about WSL) and on the GPU (definitely different from WSL). And is otherwise a lot better than WSL. I just watched a GTC presentation from Nvidia where they demonstrated Linux CUDA performance through WSL2 was the same as on a Linux box. That doesn’t really change the rest of your post, it’s still a VM, but thought I’d mention that it’s a bit better than a typical VM!

Unlike WSL 2, WSL is an api layer over the Windows NT kernel, it is not running in a VM so I guess technically it has "near bare metal performance". It's Cywin on steroids.

 

[ADGrant]

Firstly, a huge proportion of "software professionals" are developing for/supporting Windows, Android or Chromebook. Hate to burst your bubble but - Windows is still the predominant PC operating system by a huge margin. MacOS software is a tiny backwater in comparison - iOS development - is probably a stronger reason to buy a Mac, and that's a smaller market (in terms of numbers) than Android, but maybe deeper-pocketed.

The CMD window? Yeah, it sucks, but PowerShell has been around for years, or there's Cygwin if you're already familiar with a *nix-style shell and want all the Unix tools.

As for Windows doing "way" more, again, I'm sorry, but there are still swathes of specialist software only available for Windows (hence the popularity of Parallels/BootCamp/etc. on Mac and the anxious wait for a way to run Windows on M1).

True, MacOS is really great for web and other *nix-targeted development - because it is Unix but it also runs unavoidable industry-standard tools like Office and Adobe CS natively. Install brew/macports whatever and you have all the usual Unix/Linux/Open Source suspects. Great. Except... pretty soon you realise that while you *can* install everything you need for your target environment on MacOS, it makes a lot more sense to have a separate VM or container for each project, which keeps everything nicely sandboxed, avoids version or config file conflicts, and lets you exactly match your development environment to the target. At that point, the advantage of MacOS over Windows starts to dwindle - because Windows is perfectly capable of doing VMs and containers (the Pro version comes with a full hypervisor, plus there's now the Windows Linux subsystem...)

I am one of those "software professionals" developing for Windows and Linux. I use Windows 7 professionally every day but I wish I didn't have to. At home, I mostly stick to MacOS though I do have a BootCamp partition with my employer's remote access software installed in case they break their MacOS support (I haven't had to use it though).

I agree that CMD sucks but so in my opinion does PowerShell. Cywin is basically a very poor man's WSL. I would certainly use it over the regular Windows CMD shell or Powershell (and have, I use Git Bash too). WSL is better, WSL 2 is much better.

Chromebook app development is just Web development which, like Android development, can be done on either Mac, Linux or Windows. However, every Google or Facebook Engineer I have ever met (dev conferences etc) was carrying a MacBook. Facebook lets employees chose and so does Google but Google doesn't let you chose Windows unless you have a specific business need for it. iOS is not a significantly smaller Market than Android in the US, is much easier to develop for and is often more profitable. If you are targeting US teenagers, almost 90% of them have iPhones.

Matching your development environment to the target is what Docker is for and Docker on Mac does run the containers in a VM but at the command line it feels native. IDEs on both Windows and Mac allow you to debug your code on "remote" VMs running on your workstation. Ubuntu One Pass gives me a WSL 2 like experience when I really need Linux. The problem with Windows though is sooner or later you will need to drop into Windows for something. There are some differences between Linux and MacOS but they barely noticeable at the command line. MacOS runs pretty much all the same command line tools (including the more esoteric shells like tcsh). No drive letters, no path separators going the wrong way. No \r\n line endings. And best of all, the Mac uses CMD C for copy and CMD V for paste everywhere include command line, just like everywhere else.

Personally, I'm waiting for a credible Mac headless desktop machine (that doesn't involve paying $6000 for $2000 worth of computing power) and I suspect that I may have to wait a long time. Even with M1, the sort of power you can get from desktop AMD systems (Intel seem to be a lame duck at the moment) is still impressive c.f. the higher-end Macs.

The M1 Mac Mini seems more credible to me than the Intel Mac Mini which lacks a real GPU.

 

[ADGrant]

I like an awful lot about what you say and agree with it. But Windows is ONLY useable when you have an IDE that allows you to completely encapsulate your development. Android, sure, set up your Eclipse environment. Let’s ignore for a moment that Android is Linux. Cygwin? C’mon, you know better. Just because you can grep or find doesn’t mean that it’s a real development environment that you can deploy as many compilers, cross compilers, versions of Python, etc. as you wish.

Powershell almost angers me even more (thanks a lot ). The fact that they were THAT stubborn to ignore decades of proven, effective shells and deploy that thing. Don’t we all know how to use all of the standard, powerful, shell commands available since BSD Unix? That’s not advancing, that’s refusing to cede any territory.

Thankfully, Google dumped Eclipse as the Android IDE and replaced it with a rebadged Intellij IDEA. They also adopted JetBrains JVM based programming language. You are right though, using a JetBrains IDE, you can almost forget your are stuck using Windows, almost...

I agree with you 100% on PowerShell.

 

[ADGrant]

t using containers/VMs is not just a workaround - in many cases its a better, more efficient way of doing the job, which makes the host OS more or less irrelevant - and its becoming more so: lots of interesting tools in VS Code now for "remote" development (where "remote" can be in a VM or container via ssh).

Lots of IDEs support "remote" development including even the real Visual Studio. Personally I don't use VS Code, its too bloated for what it does (thanks Electron). If I want to burn a few gig of RAM I would rather use a JetBrains IDE.

Actually, if I were starting from scratch on a (funded) Linux-targetted web/server development project I'd seriously consider just spinning up a development server in the cloud - its the dev server that needs the nice fat pipe to the internet for downloading packages and stuff, its the dev server than needs a proper IP address so that others can test it & it can easily grab LetsEncrypt certs etc. The damp string to my house/workplace can keep up with my typing...

I think it is often cheaper to use your hardware than rent it from a cloud provider.

Maybe if MacOS had its own native container/sandboxing facility (...or, rather, had a frontend UI for the facilities that must already be in MacOS for app sandboxing)... but as it is, just like Windows, the first thing that any containerisation system has to do is spin up a Linux VM.

Actually there is such a thing as a Windows Docker Container than runs on the Windows 10 kernel. If you can't port your legacy Windows apps to .NET Core I guess it is useful. However, Linux is the standard platform for containerized work loads and you don't have to pay Microsoft a licensing fee. I don't see much value in using anything else.

It is most certainly usable. As I said, please elucidate on what you think is actually missing. Mac OS is a good system for development - but it's far from unassailable... and with Apple Silicon it has now lost the advantage of being able to virtualise/dual boot x86 OSs: I don't think that's as critical as some people think (just spin up a PC or x86 Linux instance in the cloud), but it is a lost advantage.

That is true but Apple Silicon is great for running ARM 64 Linux containers and VMs. Anyone looking to migrate their x86 Linux workloads to ARM might find the Apple Silicon Macs very interesting.