Tag Archives: macOS

Some benchmarks for building an Eclipse project: Linux, Windows, macOS (M1)

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I want to share some benchmarks for building an Eclipse project with Maven/Tycho. I built the project on Linux, Windows, and macOS (in particular, on my Mac Air M1 2020).

I stressed that the macOS environment is an M1, the new Arm-based chip from Apple, which is said to be quite efficient and performant. However, I also used an older Mac Air 2016, so no M1 here.

Concerning Linux and Windows, I used an LG GRAM 16. Both are good machines with powerful processors, 16Gig RAM, and NVMe disk. I ran the same build on a few Linux distributions (Arch, Ubuntu, Fedora) and the results concerning Linux are basically the same.

The Eclipse project is Edelta, https://github.com/LorenzoBettini/edelta, “An Xtext DSL for EMF metamodels refactoring and migration.” It’s quite a complex project with an extensive test suite: unit tests, integration tests (JUnit Plug-in tests), and SWTBot tests. The project also includes a custom Maven plugin, which is also tested. Yes, I’m test-addicted 😉

To avoid the Internet connection influencing the benchmarks, I first run the Maven build once so that Maven downloads and caches all the dependencies. Moreover, I first mirrored the p2 Eclipse artifacts so that the target platform definition is resolved against the local mirror.

LG GRAM 16 (LINUX) Total time: 03:25 min

LG GRAM 16 (WINDOWS) Total time: 04:20 min

MACBOOK AIR M1 Total time: 02:49 min

MACBOOK AIR 2016 Total time: 08:17 min

I must say I was impressed by the best performance shown by the M1 processor!

As expected, on the same machine, Windows performs worse than Linux 🙂

The performance of the old Mac Air is not impressive, but that’s an old machine.

Just for fun, I ran the same build on the PineBook Pro (which runs Manjaro KDE): Total time: 21:27 min. Of course, that’s not usable for intensive development 😉

macOS: switch between different windows of the same application

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Maybe this is well-known to macOS users, but it wasn’t clear to me as a Linux user.

As a Linux user, I’m used to using Alt+Tab to switch between different windows. But I also use the shortcut to switch between different windows of the same application. In Gnome, the shortcut is Alt+<the key above Tab>, which is cool because it works with any keyboard layout. In KDE it is Alt+backtick (`), which has to be changed in Italian keyboards, like mine to Alt+\. Indeed, in the Italian keyboard layout, the key over tab is \.

In macOS it’s the same as in KDE: the shortcut is bound by default to ⌘+`, which of course it’s unusable in Italian keyboards (you should use a complex combination of keys only to insert the backtick ` character). You then have to configure the shortcut “Move focus to next window”, which is quite counterintuitive to me (I had always thought that it wasn’t possible in macOS to switch between windows of the same application if not by using the touchpad gesture or by pressing the down key after using the standard switcher):

Change it to something suitable for your keyboard layout. For the Italian layout I change it to ⌘+\:

And then you’re good to go! 🙂

Using the Unison File Synchronizer on macOS

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For ages, I’ve been using the excellent Unison file synchronizer to synchronize my directories across several Linux machines, using the SSH protocol. I love it! 🙂

Unison gives you complete control over the synchronization, and, most of all, it’s a two-way synchronizer.

Quoting from its home page:

Unison is a file-synchronization tool for OSX, Unix, and Windows. It allows two replicas of a collection of files and directories to be stored on different hosts (or different disks on the same host), modified separately, and then brought up to date by propagating the changes in each replica to the other.

On Linux, I never experienced problems with Unison, especially from the installation point of view: it’s available on most distributions’ package managers. If that’s not the case, you can download a binary package from https://github.com/bcpierce00/unison/releases.

However, I had never used Unison on a macOS computer, so today, I decided to try it.

Please, keep in mind that you must use the same version of Unison on all the computers you want to synchronize (at least, I seem to understand, the major.minor version numbers must be the same on all computers, and this also includes the version of OCaml, on which Unison relies).

For macOS, you go to https://github.com/bcpierce00/unison/releases, and you download the .app.tar.gz file according to the Unison (and OCaml) version you need. The other macOS .tar.gz archives, without the .app, contain the command-line binary and a GTK UI binary, which, however, requires the GTK libraries to be already installed on your system and, to be honest, I have no idea how to do that in a compatible way. On the contrary, the .app.tar.gz contains the macOS application, which, I seem to understand, it’s self-contained.

By the way, there’s also a brew package for Unison, but that’s only the command line application, so you won’t get any UI, which is quite helpful, especially when you want to have complete control over the elements to be synchronized and you want to have the last chance to select or unselect the files before the synchronization starts. Moreover, the UI is quite helpful when you have conflicts to solve.

Then, you extract the archive, and you need to run this command (assuming you have extracted it in the Downloads folder):

otherwise, macOS will complain (with an unhelpful error message about a damaged app) since it does not recognize the archive provider.

Move the Unison.app into your Applications, and you’re good to go, assuming you already know how to use Unison.

The first time you run the app, it will ask you to install also the command-line version of Unison, which is also helpful:

And here’s a screenshot showing the files that are going to be synchronized in an example of mine (from the direction of the arrows, you can see that this is a two-way synchronization):

I find the Linux UI of Unison much simpler to understand and deal with, but maybe that’s because I’ve been using it for ages, and I still do.

Happy synchronization! 🙂