Re:New MacBook Air
by lliamander on Wednesday March 18, 2020 @05:30PM
(#22621433)
I totally agree that you can't fit all programmers into one bucket. I think we should be able to describe some general patterns in programmer workflows such that we can give concrete advice to programmers about what kind of hardware they would need.
A perfect example of this the recent Level1Techs video about compiling an Unreal engine game using the AMD Threadripper 3990X[1]. Some concrete advice:
1. Often the heaviest aspect of a programmer's workflow isn't compiling the code, but running automated tests using VMs and stuff
2. compilers tend to benefit from large cache sizes and good single-threaded performance. Multi-threaded performance only makes a difference in limited scenarios.
I've also heard that storage performance, and in particular storage latency, can make a big difference on compiler performance, but the difference is starker on Windows than on Linux because NTFS is a lot slower than many Linux file systems (EXT4, XFS, etc.).
The thing is, we as programmers don't have a good mental model for how the software tools we use (IDEs, virtualization/docker, compilers) scale with modern hardware, and very few technology reviewers are producing content that would help us understand.
A perfect example of this the recent Level1Techs video about compiling an Unreal engine game using the AMD Threadripper 3990X[1]. Some concrete advice:
1. Often the heaviest aspect of a programmer's workflow isn't compiling the code, but running automated tests using VMs and stuff
2. compilers tend to benefit from large cache sizes and good single-threaded performance. Multi-threaded performance only makes a difference in limited scenarios.
I've also heard that storage performance, and in particular storage latency, can make a big difference on compiler performance, but the difference is starker on Windows than on Linux because NTFS is a lot slower than many Linux file systems (EXT4, XFS, etc.).
The thing is, we as programmers don't have a good mental model for how the software tools we use (IDEs, virtualization/docker, compilers) scale with modern hardware, and very few technology reviewers are producing content that would help us understand.
[1]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VQa6r6Ci1jg