Just as a quick comment—the difference in compile times between Clang and GCC is fairly significant. I regularly see much shorter compile times on macOS development systems and after trying Clang on Linux, the gap narrows significantly.
My most recent experience was with building GCC for cross-compiling. I had been doing work on Linux and spun up a cloud VM instance to do the compiling there with tons of CPU. Later, I wanted a Mac build environment set up, and when I compiled GCC on macOS with Clang, it was much faster to build. I went back to my Linux system and tried compiling GCC using Clang there, and got the same result.
At the same time, the Linux kernel uses so many GCC specific extensions to C that an unpatched Clang couldn't even compile it until 2019. It is not in any way a typical program.
The benchmark that matters to me is battery life. I read that you can get a full day out of these things if you work them hard and 2 days if you're not so demanding.
The fact that you get this sort of battery life with high end desktop performance is incredible.
That's true. I can easily get more than a day's worth of work (coding + reading + browsing for reference) out of the M1 without having to reach for my charger. Of course I mostly use vim for coding, so YMMV if you're using something heavier like VSCode, Intellij, etc.
It's very true. I bought an M1 laptop a few weeks ago, and I'm near Seattle right now in the middle of a long power outage with no end in site, and suddenly the amazing battery life of this laptop is even more valuable.
I agree, and it matters to non power users aswell, in general a new standard of quiet, cool, long lasting computing that is unmatched by anything else on the market.
Most of what I do on my Mac is using Rosetta (developer) and I can easily get an actual 12+ hours out of my MacBook Air compared to around 4 hours from my 16” MacBook Pro. It’s just as fast (or faster). It’s astonishing.
Pfft okay - if you only consider Apple's purposes I guess lol.
On an M1 you can run exactly one OS - macOS. And in that OS you have to get permission from Apple to do all sorts of simple things, from running programs to blocking network calls that go back to Apple.
I can run any OS I want on my hardware and I can run my OS on any truly general purpose hardware. Every time I run a program, my OS doesn't go ask the manufacturer if it's okay to run it. That's a general purpose computer.
Mac users had to wait for Apple's permission to do it :)
You generally can't do things on a Mac unless Apple allows it. You certainly can't do them the way you want to unless it coincides with the Apple way. If you don't think so, try writing an app and giving it to your friends without jumping through all of Apple's hoops :)
This is the second time I've seen compilation as a benchmark since the M1 came out.
If you are not building for the same target (ie both building for arm or x86) using the same version of the compiler, it doesn't count. This is like opening libre office writer on one computer and MS word on another and calling the startup time a benchmark.
My _anecdotal_ understanding is that _generally_ on _average_ for identical as they can be targets, gcc compiles faster but generates slightly larger artifacts while clang would compile slower but generate slightly smaller artifacts.
This makes me wonder if a comparison not using the same compiler really reveals enough of the story here.
Basically, it's not uncommon to find things running 1.5x faster on M1. Even outside of benchmarks, everything is perceptibly - dare I say it - snappier.
Interesting results re: emacs. Your tweet says you’re using emacs-plus, presumably via brew? Are you running emacs with Rosetta or is it an arm64 build?
You can't compare the performance of an SoC with a flexible architecture in which any part can be changed, upgraded, etc. It's impressive, of course - no doubt, but this is not apples-to-apples comparison. The performance is due to huge compromises. It will be costly to repair, too, given EU is mandating the right to repair now. Anyway, competition is great and Intel and AMD are already taking notes.
That's what I think too and I get downvoted all the time for saying that a system on a chip freshly designed from the ground up with mobile use as a goal, with tightly integrated everything and ad-hoc software written on top of course runs great.
Of course you can. In fact, the user included a not- particularly upgradable or reparable Intel Macbook in the comparison.
Compile times and upgradeability/reparability are not mutually exclusive.
It is not wrong to highlight the tradeoff. But people are allowed to decide "I want to give up reparability for nearly 5x faster compiles." Which is what the person got when comparing to the prior generation Macbook with the same compiler.
I haven’t had to install a printer driver to print from macOS in ages. Unless you’ve got a weird/old printer, it’ll probably just work with AirPrint out of the box.
I see, yes most default printer drivers do work, but I believe you still need software for scanners, and probably (atleast this is true on Windows) some printers allow advanced changes to settings only via their software.
"The old Apple laptop would sound like a VAX in a hurricane while building Emacs!"
Sysadmin to a VAX farm in an earlier life -- this brought back some good memories, especially of what our server room sounded like when we pushed a new build... Thanks for that.
The version you're replacing is two processes. It may, with enough files, give an error about a command line length limit. However, it's one find and one rm. Your version spawns rm for every file found, basically like using xargs.
That's true. Getting shell escapes right for various shells is not a fun thing to do, either. I think the ship has sailed on convincing people not to use spaces in file names, so that's always good to check.
My most recent experience was with building GCC for cross-compiling. I had been doing work on Linux and spun up a cloud VM instance to do the compiling there with tons of CPU. Later, I wanted a Mac build environment set up, and when I compiled GCC on macOS with Clang, it was much faster to build. I went back to my Linux system and tried compiling GCC using Clang there, and got the same result.
Clang is fast. Just saying.