ElCapitan

elijahg said:

ElCapitan said:

The rewrite to Metal for cross platform developers is non trivial because the Metal libraries only work with Objective-C or Swift, neither of which are used (if at all) outside dedicated macOS or iOS development. (Yes, IBM has done some work on server side Swift).

In addition, apart from the VR announcement at WWDC 2018, Apple has gone completely silent on the subject. 

Loss of OpenGL, and the lack of a replacement that can work cross platform, will rob the macOS users of a large number of software titles once OpenGL is gone from the platform (macOS 10.16 speculative). 

... but it may end up deprecated. 

tht said:

ElCapitan said:

tht said:

ElCapitan said:

cat52 said:

I'm a software dev and push my machines fairly hard and have to say the 2018 Mini is pretty much perfect in every way.  It's powerful, quiet, small, and cheap.  And I 100x prefer using macOS over Linux on the desktop.

So for those thinking Apple is dead, supposedly in Silicon Valley even, I just have to roll my eyes.

For lengthy Xcode compiles (or something else in a VM) the mini is far from quiet. The fan noise gets pretty annoying over time when you listen to it for hours on end. 

Also, the graphics performance makes it completely unsuitable to test anything 3D graphics for real. You can verify that it is working on Intel graphics, but you cannot test real performance that end users may want. 

I don't think you know what pushing a mini hard for dev actually means. 

I'm curious if you have ever looked at buying Mac minis, networking them, and doing compile jobs this way?

The tradeoff with getting a Mac Pro would be interesting because at some amount of dollars for a single user, spending the extra money for a single box would be better. Then again, you can get 6 6-core Mac minis for $6k. That's 36 cores to play with. 

I have looked at it, but when making cross platform apps they also need to compile for the other platforms which are often done in virtual machines, which does not work with that distributed build approach. 

We have replaced some of the 6/12 core/threads minis with trashcans refitted with close to new 12/24 core/threads Xeon cpus and they both do the job faster, are virtually silent and have graphics performance that is quite a few notches up from the minis (although quite mediocre when it really comes to it).  These machines also run virtual machines pretty well. 

Can you distribute the compiles on a VM per networked machine basis? Ie, instead of using all the machines to compile an app for one platform, have each machine compile for different platforms concurrently?

Seems like your computational needs aren't that far away from needing to get some racks and a server room if your compute jobs are lasting on order hours. The longest thing I do are video transcodes on my 2013 iMac 27. 10 videos can go all night. A 2018 Mac mini would do my H.265 transcodes 10x faster, but I don't do it enough to really need to change anything.

cat52 said:

I'm a software dev and push my machines fairly hard and have to say the 2018 Mini is pretty much perfect in every way.  It's powerful, quiet, small, and cheap.  And I 100x prefer using macOS over Linux on the desktop.

So for those thinking Apple is dead, supposedly in Silicon Valley even, I just have to roll my eyes.

corrections said:

ElCapitan said:

First of all there is a rude awakening across the planet of the insanity of shipping production of goods and services offshore, and putting all eggs in the Chinese basket.  The effect of the COVID-19 crisis is that suddenly all countries starts to act like countries again, and global sourcing has to a large extent collapsed. 

With the upcoming financial depression we just have seen the start of, people are going to first cut on subscriptions; cloud services, music, media streaming, software subscriptions, then anything premium.

People are going to get much more aware of purchasing products that creates jobs in their countries and not someone elsewhere. Equally they are going become much more focused on that their hard earned money don't stuff the coffers of international companies that hardly give anything back to their markets (taxes, job creation, local economic growth). 

You really need to reconsider what you think about jobs.