What hardware do you use for compiling for iOS and...

# multiplatform

[Natasha Murashkina]

What hardware do you use for compiling for iOS and how's your experience? Particularly interested what's your processor (M1 / M2 / etc) and memory.

Mac Mini M1 16 GB anyone?

[Jacob Ras]

I bought an M1/8GB and it serves me well. New solo project, so a small codebase. It performs well, I use it for building and testing on the simulator. Haven't tried a big codebase yet.

[Natasha Murashkina]

@Jacob Ras Wonderful, thank you for sharing! Just to confirm, you do use Android studio & do build for multiplatform, including iOS?

[Jacob Ras]

On the Mac I mostly use XCode to run the project. It runs Gradle directly and builds the whole thing, no externally built framework. Sometimes I use Fleet to make small changes and test something but my main development is done on a more powerful Windows machine (in Studio or IntelliJ). The Mac is just for testing.

[Daniel Seither]

There’s a recent discussion about what Mac to buy: https://kotlinlang.slack.com/archives/C3PQML5NU/p1698068220411969

This was before M3 Macs were released though. The M3 Pro CPU sits somewhere in the middle between the M3 and the M3 Max, while M2 Pro was as fast as M2 Max. If I were to buy a new MBP for work now, I’d pick the “base level” M3 Max (36GB RAM, 1TB SSD, from 3600€ in Germany) to minimize the time I spend waiting for the compiler.

You can definitely get some work done on any Mac with an M-series CPU though. If you have some budget left for upgrades, 16GB RAM would be my first pick and 512MB SSD my second.

[Jacob Ras]

JFYI: I paid €549 for my refurbished M1/8 Mini since I only use it to build & test 😬

[Andrey Larionov]

I purchased the M1 Max (10/32/32/1TB) upon its release because I needed to run thousands of apps simultaneously:

• Android Studio with emulators (for my work project and personal multiplatform project)
• VS Code for python-related tasks
• Docker with several containers (for running servers, etc)
• pgAdmin for PostgreSQL management
• 8 browser instances to manage my life :DD
• Other applications like Telegram, Slack, Teams, Spotify, Notion, and Postman
I still love my M1 Max + 49'' Samsung monitor setup - it’s (imho) perfect for productivity, but even with 32GB my mac occasionally runs out of memory :DDD
I plan to upgrade to the M4 Max once it’s released

[Natasha Murashkina]

@Jacob Ras as in: you develop on a different machine and only build/test on mac? curious, what's your setup like? why have you decided to use a physical mac for it, rather than a mac vps? (pardon me if it's not really feasible, I'm very new to the ecosystem!)

[Jacob Ras]

Yep @Natasha Murashkina ! For my full Compose Multiplatform project I develop 99% on my Windows machines, aside from some actual implementations or Swift implementations of classes.

At the office we have a dozen Mac Mini build servers and I connect remotely to them quite regularly. I'm disappointed in the performance of that, using VNC Viewer, so that's why I don't use a VPS. And I'm not sure how it works with persisting installed apps, security et cetera. But, in hindsight, it could've been an interesting option as I use my own Mini now only a couple of hours a month 😬

[Natasha Murashkina]

Thank you for sharing your experience!