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macOS What hardware do you like to program with?

Was a Windows 2000 PC with 2 19" screens in portrait mode.
Now a 24" iMac with 1 19" screen in portrait mode.
Programming for embedded systems. I tend to like a big messy desk. Screen desktop not much different :eek:
 
Cromulent said:
Although I must say that the power of the Mac Pro is completely wasted on programming really.

Xcode runs fast enough to do just about anything.
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I wish I had a Mac Pro for programming. Building large software suites can take a long time and I wish I had 8 cores to do it with at once. Honestly, I can't wait until Macbook (pros) start coming with quad cores for this very reason. At the company I work for, so much time is wasted while programmers wait for their software to build.

I myself usually just use a Macbook (I do everything in terminal. embedded and gui stuff) with an external monitor attached, or my iMac at home.
 
I do all mine on a Macbook, Intel Core 2 Duo, 4gb RAM, 13"... The screen size never bothered me, I suppose I acclimated myself to a small screen. That and I don't have the money or room for a external screen, I make do with what I got :)

And also, the programing I do at the present time isn't for a job but as a spare time hobby. So I don't need a larger screen or a more powerful computer.
 
NRose8989 said:
What do you like about this keyboard? is it because of the special characters or is it the feel?
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Sorry for my delay in responding to you (about the Matias Tactile Pro 2.0), NRose8989. I don't need the "special characters" on the keyboard. I bought the keyboard only for its tactile feel. The keys have a very solid (and loud!!) click when you are typing. I can very accurately type over 100 words per minute (only know this because someone recently wanted me to try a speed typing test), and this keyboard allows me to really get going fast. It just has a great feel to it.

A couple negatives, however: I've broken one of the two legs on it several times (had to request a bag of replacements from the manufacturer). The key mappings are a little more strange than the ones I've seen on other keyboards. The design of all keyboards requires, by the way, that not all of the key combinations will be unique, so that (for instance) typing two keys in tandem will do something unexpected. I have found some two-key combinations on the Tactile Pro 2.0 that do things that are extra-unexpected (i.e., really weird!). The construction of the keyboard also leaves something to be desired. The plastic seems to bend in such a way that, for instance, I can occasionally get the space bar rubbing against the plastic in an undesirable way. Also, to use the USB port, you must plug two USB connections into your computer, so you don't "gain" a port with the keyboard at all (very strange!).

Wow, this was a longer post than I intended. Sorry!

Anyway, it's a really great keyboard (albeit expensive), and I'm hoping that the Tactile Pro 3.0 is a further improvement on an already great product when it is released by Matias. The excellent feeling I get when typing on this keyboard outweigh the negatives, for me. It reminds me of typing on those really heavy IBM keyboards in the 1980's. Those were excellent keyboards.... Rock solid.
 
Cromulent said:
Generally I use my Mac Pro with a 24" monitor. Although I must say that the power of the Mac Pro is completely wasted on programming really.
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The power of the Mac Pro is definitely like using a sledgehammer to put a small nail in the wall. The tasks of programming themselves could be done easily on almost any machine.

For me, the advantage of the Mac Pro is the 8 cores, so that I can run the programs I write (usually running 8 separate instantiations, one per core, for a few weeks at a time) before batching them out to large grids.

(The screen real estate is also crucial for me, when visualizing a lot of data.... but I think my use of the Mac Pro for crunching numbers is a little unorthodox, compared to many people here, who are often using the Mac Pro for multimedia.)
 
Just upgraded to the quad MBP with 8GB RAM. This thing screams in Xcode. I timed doing a compile of my biggest project from a clean and it was roughly 4x faster (very unscientific test). Seeing it compile 8 files at once vs 2 is awesome :D

Pretty amazing performance improvement from a 2.5 year old computer.
 
Avizzv92 said:
I do all mine on a Macbook, Intel Core 2 Duo, 4gb RAM, 13"... The screen size never bothered me, I suppose I acclimated myself to a small screen.
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I do my coding on my 24" iMac with a 27" second screen. I would seriously struggle to code on a 13" screen. I like to spread myself out with a minimum of window overlapping. Especially I like to have the developer docs and project specs side-by-side with my IDE.

My next upgrade will most probably will be an MBP. But I'll see what's on offer with the next iMac refresh first.
 
mward333 said:
The power of the Mac Pro is definitely like using a sledgehammer to put a small nail in the wall. The tasks of programming themselves could be done easily on almost any machine.
)
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This is not true for large enough programs. I work on C++ code that takes over an hour for a full build on a i5 system. More cores, with appropriate memory, would be nice.

Edit: just noticed I replied to a really old post. Wow. Anyway, still true.
 
I've done a lot of Mac programming on a Mac SE/30 and a Duo 210 (both 68030 CPUs with a 7" display), a PowerMac 7100 (overclocked to a blazing 80 MHz), a G3 266, an MBP 13, and most recently an MBA 11.

Having an optional large display monitor available helps.
 
I use the Mac Pro in my sig and dual 27 inch monitors.

If I'm just writing scripts for Unity or doing some small project I may just use my Macbook Air.
 
JustSomeDude said:
This is not true for large enough programs. I work on C++ code that takes over an hour for a full build on a i5 system. More cores, with appropriate memory, would be nice.

Edit: just noticed I replied to a really old post. Wow. Anyway, still true.
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C++ is notoriously bad no matter what you do. Most large C projects compile in a pretty decent time frame even on old hardware; especially when using clang.

I crave more screen real estate and more RAM more than I do CPU power.
 
Cromulent said:
C++ is notoriously bad no matter what you do. Most large C projects compile in a pretty decent time frame even on old hardware; especially when using clang.

I crave more screen real estate and more RAM more than I do CPU power.
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More ram and screen is always good. I guess at some point good monitors will become large enough (and affordable). I don't know if I'll ever say I have enough ram.
 
JustSomeDude said:
This is not true for large enough programs. I work on C++ code that takes over an hour for a full build on a i5 system. More cores, with appropriate memory, would be nice.

Edit: just noticed I replied to a really old post. Wow. Anyway, still true.
Click to expand...

Over an hour? Have you ever heard of the Cheshire Cat idiom? It was used at a place I used to work at to reduce compile times down from over an hour to 10 minutes.
 
mslide said:
I wish I had a Mac Pro for programming. Building large software suites can take a long time and I wish I had 8 cores to do it with at once. Honestly, I can't wait until Macbook (pros) start coming with quad cores for this very reason. At the company I work for, so much time is wasted while programmers wait for their software to build.
Click to expand...

Why are you rebuilding every object file all the time ? You only need to rebuild the parts you modified and re-link.

Stop hitting the "Clean All Targets" option and you won't need 8 cores on programmer workstations. :p
 
I'm now a hobbyist (sad), so I use a MacBook Pro to do my homegrown projects. If I was developing professionally I would have a laptop + desktop with a large external monitor to be able to organize multiple shells and code windows. The desktop would primarily be used to do any heavy lifting (like full builds and perhaps run a local regression environment). The laptop would be useful for coding away from the desk.
 
Mac Player said:
The fastest hardware possible.


Unless you know what your doing.
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Millions of lines of source code takes time to build regardless.

JimBobBennett said:
Over an hour? Have you ever heard of the Cheshire Cat idiom? It was used at a place I used to work at to reduce compile times down from over an hour to 10 minutes.
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Are you talking about the pimpl pattern? It's used (somewhat).
 
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JustSomeDude said:
Millions of lines of source code takes time to build regardless.
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Unless you have 1,000,000 lines divided into 1,000 files that are 1,000 lines each, or even smaller files. Then when you change 3-4 of these files the recompile should just be building these 3-4 objects and linking. The only time you should have to rebuild more than a few files at a time is if you've changed a header file and you'd rather make clean rather than finding every source file that header file change is going to affect to touch.

-Lee
 
lee1210 said:
Unless you have 1,000,000 lines divided into 1,000 files that are 1,000 lines each, or even smaller files. Then when you change 3-4 of these files the recompile should just be building these 3-4 objects and linking. The only time you should have to rebuild more than a few files at a time is if you've changed a header file and you'd rather make clean rather than finding every source file that header file change is going to affect to touch.

-Lee
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An hour isn't my typical build time. But a full rebuild takes over an hour. Depending upon the change, though a build could take that long.

Who knows what the build time could be reduced to given infinite refactoring time. All I way saying, it was silly to assume that there isn't real, widely used software, being build that could utilize the power of Mac Pro. Honestly, I wonder how many of you realize the realities of working with large code bases with large number of programmers? Geez.
 
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