A lot of their speed comes from special tricks like bypassing the kernel and going direct to hardware (DPDK).

Intel's DPDK doesn't support Mac OS X.

You should probably develop in a VM anyways, or at least with a platform + hardware that supports these features so you can better match what production deployments will be like.

I always cringe a little, for backend systems software, when people develop in an environment completely divorced from their production environment. It just creates headaches.

In posix mode, seastar uses the host's TCP stack (instead of the internal super-fast stack). This is useful for development. While we haven't ported it to osx, it should be fairly easy as the code is portable.

Note you'll need gcc 4.9 or later.