clj-m1-notes

Clojure on the M1, notes and a quick comparison

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Clojure on the M1: notes and a quick comparison

The first wave of Apple’s M1-based computers are now out in the wild. Obviously the first question is: “Can I get my clojure dev environment up and running today?”

tl;dr yes, with surprisingly few caveats, dodges and workarounds. Only one really.

So, The Goal: Quickly replicate the existing Clojure development environment present on a trusty & high-milage ‘traveller’ laptop, onto a new M1-based Mac Mini.

 

gear used

environment

a fairly minimal web dev setup including:

Not included here : the unboxing, user and credential setup, etc.

 

setup

OpenJDK:
Ok, this is the ONE slight caveat mentioned in the intro and naturally is the most important piece. At the present time there is a JEP ongoing for OpenJDK M1 port but Azul has already released a M1 build of OpenJDK.

There are various build versions available but for now I’m using that stalwart JDK of the clojure dev ecosystem, version 1.8, via the bundle rather than the dmg installer.

So; Download the bundle zip file, verify the sha256 signature, and install as follows:

Look inside the zip and copy the ‘zulu-8-x86.jdk’ folder.

paste this into /Library/Java/JavaVirtualMachines/

NOTE: if you have, by some chance, set the JAVA_HOME environment variable you will need to UNSET it.

now, running:

/usr/libexec/java_home

should yield:

/Library/Java/JavaVirtualMachines/zulu-8.jdk/Contents/Home

and:

java -version

should yield:

openjdk version "1.8.0_275"
OpenJDK Runtime Environment (Zulu 8.50.0.1013-CA-macos-aarch64) (build 1.8.0_275-b01)
OpenJDK 64-Bit Server VM (Zulu 8.50.0.1013-CA-macos-aarch64) (build 25.275-b01, mixed mode)

Yay! Java!

 

git
The first time you type ‘git’ in a terminal you are prompted to install the XCode CLI dev tools. This takes just a few minutes of waiting. The version installed here is Git 2.24.3 (Appple Git-128).

update: The Big Sur 11.01 update is substantial enough to require the re-installation of XCode Command Line Tools, usually a major release action item.
After the update git, among other commands, will fail with an “xcrun error”.
For me, the simplest fix worked fine: xcode-select --install
In-depth info along with further remediation options can be found at this indispensible StackOverflow post.

vi/vim
Preinstalled, NOP.

MacVim
I use this editor on the MBA and it installed as usual on the Mini. But as it currently is still a Intel x86 binary it will need to run under Rosetta, the x86 -> M1 translation utility.

The ‘translation’ ops are fast (< 1m) and one-time. MacVim then launches normally. As fast as ever.

If this is the first x86 app you have tried to install you will get a prompt to install Rosetta.
And the Activity Monitor utility helpfully includes a architecture [“Apple” “Intel”] column.

I completed the editor setup with some config file tweaks and a few favored plugins: paredit, vim-fireplace, vim-vinegar and solarized. As those are vimscript + python plugins no problems were expected and none occurred.

Leiningen
Install via the lein script as per the usual instructions on the Leiningen site.
I went with the $HOME/bin style of install here. It was completely usual and nominal.

 

READY! At this point you should have a working Clojure dev environment on your M1 hardware of choice.

 

(optional) postgresql
There are currently a few options for installing this DB, including via Homebrew, compiling from source and GUI apps. In order to match the MBA environment I used Postgres.app. As this is currently still only x86-based it passes through the Rosetta translations ops upon first run.
Installs and runs as expected.

Some Maybe Options not addressed here

 

A quick comparison

The new Mini feels exremely responsive and snappy. How about a quick, totally ad-hoc performance test?

In an attempt at equity I added the x86_64 build of the Azul JDK1.8 to the MBA and set it as the active JVM.

Also ‘lein deps’ was pre-run on the M1 Mini to assure that the the local Maven (.m2) archives are equivalent with regard to target project..

Still, this is not exactly a fair comparison; the Mini has a bigger fan and is running Big Sur while the MBA is fully patched but not bumped up to this latest OS.

Nevertheless…

 

Assembling a deployment-ready uberjar from a ~32Kloc website source base: Literally a current project I was just deploying, cloned onto the new platform. For Science.

runs, averaged & rounded up MBA M1 Mini
10 48 secs 17 secs

So the M1 Mini required only about 35% of the processing time of the MBA; not too bad.

Hardly an epic computation, but this is a basic type of op that many of us do very frequently.

 

Calculate a large number of distances using the Havorsine algorithm. Again, something from yesterday’s workday:

A distance calculation from a single fixed point -“Point Nemo”, the Oceanic Pole of Inaccessibility- to a randomly-generated lat/lng coordinate. Repeated many, many times. It’s a thing that is done.

code snippet included in this repo.
 

rounds MBA M1 Mini % difference
3m 2676 ms 1536 ms ~57%
30m 26229 ms 14612 ms ~55%
300m 264782 ms 145606 ms ~55%

The M1 Mini is somewhat less than twice as fast at this task as the MBA. Nice.

linear perf was expected and linear perf was recieved; The M1 Mini time for 3 Billion reps is 1437448 ms.

Another decidedly non-cpu-melting, apparently fanless benchmark but it looks like Apple is really not fooling around with this latest SoC initiative.

 

epilogue

This lowest-tier M1 Mini is really impressive, and replicating a minimal ‘live’ clojure dev environment from a previous generation laptop was mostly straightforward. There are still many holes in M1 software support but I expect these will be filled-out in short order.

Even a few trivial performance comparisons suggest notable gains in a daily-driver development situation. Finally, both the M1 Mini and 2017 MBA used here are low-end machines. It will be very interesting to see what the inevitable 16” MBP M(x) laptop will be able to do. I expect somewhere inside the Ring there are some squee-worthy prototypes.

And although I’d be surprised to see Apple target a product for the datacenter space, one might imagine what could be packed into a 1U, and what the power & cooling reductions might look like there.

#StatusQuoRIP