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by Will_Do 2051 days ago
Question: Would using R inside Docker on one of these Macs work somewhat well?

Previous benchmarks[0] show that the overhead on Intel Macbooks for the Docker Linux VM is quite low for scientific computing.

Would the x86 emulation hurt performance substantially or is there some other issue with this approach?

[0]: https://lemire.me/blog/2020/06/19/computational-overhead-due...
2 comments
mr_toad 2051 days ago
Why would you run R on a Mac in Docker? Docker isn’t an emulator. You’re still going to need ARM code.
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dehrmann 2051 days ago
Not that this wasn't a known caveat of Docker, but I think a lot of people are going to realize this in the next year or two.
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ryukafalz 2051 days ago
I would imagine that Docker for Mac will likely get native support for ARM macOS soon enough, in which case there'd be no x86 emulation involved and you could run the ARM Linux version of R in a container just fine.

My understanding is Rosetta 2 does not support x86 virtualization.

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