I got the MacBook Pro M1 16GB when it was launched in November 2020. I was losing my previous provided laptop by leaving my previous job and needed to buy one to join a startup program. It was a big gamble but I am the kind of early adopter guy that did not want to miss out on this new CPU fun.
It meant for me that in the beginning IDEs, Java and things like node ran all in Rosetta mode and were very slow. I was almost starting to regret my choice. Sometimes there were Arm fixes committed for things like NodeJS but they were not yet released so I needed to build my own version. Same issues with the JVM to find something able to run smoothly. (Felt that the slowdown was extra painful for JIT like languages) Also for Docker it meant waiting for some months to have something that would work properly but luckily I could manage without at the start. I was happy to see that major blockages improved in some months and for some lagging dependencies I was pushing some fixes myself.
At this moment almost 1.5 years later everything works smoothly. The IDE, Java, Node etc. I still had to navigate around some specific dependencies but the fully native M1 development flow is so smooth compared to my previous Intel MacBook. I am quite happy.
Rosetta is fast unless any kind of JITed code is involved. A lot of Java development is happening with tools written in Java for the JVM which is relying a lot on JIT compilation.
The JetBrains IDEs were bordering unusable under Rosetta. They would speed up over time as Rosetta did its work, but it was multiple tens of minutes of slow as molasses until things got better and after each IDE restart you were back at square one.
Thankfully, JetBrains released updates to their products to run on a bundled ARM JVM very quickly
Very true! I received my MacBook on November 23rd 2020 and Jetbrains released an ARM optimised version of IntelliJ December 30th 2020. I may have used an EAP version some days/few weeks before release. https://blog.jetbrains.com/idea/2020/12/intellij-idea-2020-3...
I remember that first month as being very painful to use the IDE. It was really dramatically slow.
Discord was also pretty bad under Rosetta. Last I checked the Canary version was built for Apple Silicon and ran much better, though I'm not sure if that's made it to the stable release yet.
It meant for me that in the beginning IDEs, Java and things like node ran all in Rosetta mode and were very slow. I was almost starting to regret my choice. Sometimes there were Arm fixes committed for things like NodeJS but they were not yet released so I needed to build my own version. Same issues with the JVM to find something able to run smoothly. (Felt that the slowdown was extra painful for JIT like languages) Also for Docker it meant waiting for some months to have something that would work properly but luckily I could manage without at the start. I was happy to see that major blockages improved in some months and for some lagging dependencies I was pushing some fixes myself.
At this moment almost 1.5 years later everything works smoothly. The IDE, Java, Node etc. I still had to navigate around some specific dependencies but the fully native M1 development flow is so smooth compared to my previous Intel MacBook. I am quite happy.