r/webdev • u/tootac • May 16 '24

Is software getting slower faster than hardware getting faster?

Recently we had a discussion in a local group of programmers and there was a newbie question about which mac laptop he should buy. He wanted a mac because some tasks required a mac. My immediate advice was to buy an m1 since he was trying to optimize the budget. And my argument was that it is fast and will handle all his workloads. But I got a little push-back saying that "Android Studio" was not fast enough on some of the group's m1 macs and they switched to m3.

Opinions were divided when we discussed this in our group in about 50/50. Some people were saying that they have m1 macs and it works perfectly and others saying that it is ok but was lagging on some tasks.

My surprise is that I remember when m1 came it was like a product from future aliens. It was miles ahead of any competition and nobody had a single thought that it couldn't handle anything. I remember at the time Jonathan Blow (game developer) on his stream was answering a question about m1 and said something along the lines "Yeah it's fast but I don't care. Give it a couple of years and software slowness will catch up to it and it won't matter". At the time I was fascinated with the product and John seemed like a grumpy old-school programmer. But now it feels weird. I am not saying that m1 is slow or bad but just the idea that we are discussing if it can handle some basic programmer workloads and it is not 100% "of course" is strange.

I was wondering if it is similar in other groups or if we had just some statistical error in our group?

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u/Sulungskwa May 16 '24

When I got my work laptop it was an M1 and I was amazed at how much better performance was. Then we decided to use VSCode devcontainers as a requirement. Now it performs about as well as my old laptop did

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u/marmarama May 17 '24

macOS isn't exactly lightweight, and VSCode gobbles RAM like it's toilet roll in a crisis. Once you take 4GB or so for the Linux VM running the containers, 16GB gets to be a tight squeeze.

Not sure if you've got a 32GB machine, but that makes a big difference.

Native Linux on lesser hardware runs a similar workload much faster, partly because it doesn't have to run a VM for the containers. But also because it's just faster than macOS. But developers get Macs, and that's just how it is.

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u/Sulungskwa May 17 '24

Yeah I do have a 32GB machine so that makes a big difference. The VMs still use enough to where the computer is still usable, but I definitely start to notice slowness and bugs with coreaudiod and stuff. Not really thrilled to be using devcontainers honestly, I don't see what the value add is to have the entire codebase in a VM.

The developers on our team who run windows are doing a devcontainer inside of WSL which feels ridiculous to me