Native Node is fine, and generally runs better than the equivalent MBP. My 8GB M1 handles Node & JS about twice as fast as my 16GB 15" Intel MBP from 2019.
Where you can run into issues is architecture support. I'm running Node natively, but this means that some packages that don't support ARM will fail to build properly. I've been able to work around/do without for now, but depending on your use case, it could be an issue, if you want to run Node natively. (I do not have a feel for Node via Rosetta 2 performance.)
I have to the run all my node development in x86 emulation and it's the same speed (both subjectively and by timing) as my 6 year old mac I was replacing.
Things that rely on disk speed like npm install are much faster, though.
I tried upgrading some projects so they could run arm native, but it some cases it would have forced my colleagues to update their OS since such-and-such updated library dropped support for their OS version.
I briefly went down the path of having a patchwork of arm and x86 stuff running together (like having webpack be arm native but the rest of the project not) and it was lots of fiddling. If I wasn't careful to segregate x86 and arm into completely separate shell environments, I'd end up with ldd trying to link to shared libraries with the wrong arch during [brew, npm, bundle] install. It was more trouble than it was worth.
My perspective: Going from a 2019 15" MacBook Pro with 16GB of memory to an 8GB M1 13" MacBook Pro
You don't start to feel the 8GB until you:
* have a lot of tabs open in Safari (like ~30+)
* have heavy web apps (GMail & Outlook, I'm looking at you)
* run a virtual machine (Only so much you can give a Parallels instance w/ 8GB)
* run some known performance & memory hogs (Slack, Teams, etc.)
* vpn seems to slow things down a bit
I generally will close down apps when I don't need them (but that's _always_ been my habit). I do find the M1 to be fully sufficient (and still faster than my previous MBP) when doing my day-to-day (including VS Code, JIRA, Slack, Xcode, Node, etc.). I also use my M1 for music performance and composition, and that's worked just fine for my purposes (but so did the previous MBP). I will (as I did before) switch contexts by closing apps I don't need, so it's hard to say if apps from development impact the apps for music or not; they rarely run side-by-side.
Things that have greatly improved my productivity:
* This thing is as cool as a cucumber, and absolutely sips its battery. This means I can be more comfortable taking my MBP to the couch, or to the patio (when it was warm) and not worry about watching the battery %.
* This thing _in general_ is much snappier. Native apps load quickly, and performance in the apps I use is about twice that of the previous MBP.
* I can type on this keyboard!
* Using a single external monitor is fine; I work from a couple of locations, and both my Dell P2415Q and my LG 24MD4KL-B 24" Ultrafine 4K work fine.
There are edge cases here where the M1 falls short:
* I can slow the poor thing to a crawl for a few seconds if I attach a 4K monitor and then try to AirPlay to another 4K display. It catches back up and is generally fine after, but you see the beachball for a while.
* Lots of tabs in Safari will cause slow tab switching, and some web sites just chew through CPU. Battery life is still _way_ better than the previous MBP, but it definitely impacts the feel of the device.
* Bluetooth mice -- ugh. I bought a Logitech MX ergo and had to switch to using the receiver instead because the MBP bluetooth felt so laggy.
* Most iOS apps just aren't well suited for the device. Apollo (for Reddit) works pretty well, but even that has its quirks where sometimes keyboard shortcuts will just stop working.
* VMs. If you run Windows in Parallels, you _will feel it_. I do not run VMs all the time for this reason, but spin them up and down as needed.
This is so far(04:13:32 UTC) the best answer to my question, just because most other comments seems to be 'I use 16GB, so it should be fine' disregarding 'assuming you previously had at least 32GB RAM' part of the question.
Thank you for your time writing this detailed comment.
Few things which caused degraded performance were obvious e.g. tabs, VM.
But things which surprised me,
> * vpn seems to slow things down a bit
With great single core performance and WiFi-6 I would have expected networking to fine.
> Bluetooth mice -- ugh.
Digging further, Bluetooth/WiFi/USB issues seems to documented by others as well[1] unfortunately these gets buried under other reviews following a common narrative for M1 macs.
That bluetooth lag was annoying me on my first day, but since then I haven't noticed it: either it was fixed or I got used to it. The cursor is quite responsive for me.
Maybe you should try install "Logitech Options", because I did that immediately on the first day, which might have fixed it.
I've used pagetable.com quite a lot for reference to see how things were done in CBM BASIC. I didn't always follow that direction (also looked at GW-BASIC, and others), but it has proven very useful to either set me on a well-trod direction or to validate ideas I'd already had.
I've definitely been looking a some implementations, but I don't think I directly looked at these. (Instead, pagetable.com and gw-basic and the like have proven invaluable as well.) I should write a quick post summarizing all the resources that I've been using -- that might prove useful.
When it comes to JK Rowling, absolutely. She's pretty firmly in TERF territory, and holds pretty damaging views when it comes to those of us who are trans/gender non-conforming.
She isn’t “hateful” because she disagrees. Is she not allowed to have an opinion that challenges the orthodoxy? People mix up “hate” with “opinion.” Disagreeing with something isn’t hating people.
Author here & wow! Didn't expect to see this get posted anywhere, but happy to see that there are people as interested in this stuff as I am.
If you do play with Retroputer at all, it is still very much WIP -- so lots of things aren't implemented (or don't work). It's proven a fun project to reacquaint myself with lower-level concepts after having been in very high level languages for several years.
One thing I really loved about the computers like the C64 I grew up on: it was possible to hold the entire workings of the machine in your head. While things often appeared magical at first glance, it wasn't that hard to figure out how and why they worked, and then to use that to your advantage. I don't _know_ if that's a benefit when writing high level code today, but I like to think that having that low-level understanding is useful.
It's also proven useful as a project to learn _new_ things. I'm figuring out some back-end coding, Twitter bots, and at some point would love to make this thing in hardware with an fpga. One of these days... ;-)
I think you could make your lowercase loop shorter – and definitely faster – by jumping into a second loop when inside a string, instead of setting a flag.
Oooh -- good idea. I don't think I have an instruction that quite matches. Retroputer's branch instructions are directly tied to the flags, so you can do `br !c(arry)`, but that doesn't rule out zero like `ja` does. At a quick glance I don't think that should rule something like this out, though. :-)
That looks like a really interesting book -- I think I shall add it to my reading list!
OMG--that would have been SO nice to have. I don't think I got my first taste of syntax highlighting until I got access to Turbo Pascal.
Adding it to Retroputer BASIC should be trivial. I think I'll have a go at it tonight, since it has support to use control codes to change the text color.
I wouldn't rule out the pandemic being an issue here. These are not _normal_ times, and is an additional stressor. For me stress _definitely_ impacts my ability to think clearly, and the higher the stress (even if not immediately obvious to me), the worse my thinking skills are.
As another commenter mentioned, migraines can also do this. Not all migraines come with a lot of pain, so that's not always a dead giveaway. But during a migraine, my thoughts are muddy as hell.
Just seconding this by proxy. Thanks to some early steps, I'm about as unaffected by COVID-19 as a person can be. I live in a neighborhood with acres between houses, telework to an office across the country, and am not at all unused to not leaving the house for a week at a time. In addition, I was able to make a bigger-than-usual trip to Costco in addition to already having some disaster preparedness steps taken well before-hand (fresh batteries, fresh water containment, rice / flour / staple foods on hand, etc.) and yet I still find myself at numerous points throughout the day thinking about some things I need, or might need in the near future, trying to find ways to procure said thing without leaving the home, and it's draining me in very small doses.
Where you can run into issues is architecture support. I'm running Node natively, but this means that some packages that don't support ARM will fail to build properly. I've been able to work around/do without for now, but depending on your use case, it could be an issue, if you want to run Node natively. (I do not have a feel for Node via Rosetta 2 performance.)