[throwaway894345]

Docker For Max marshals filesystem events over a VM host/guest boundary which can grind the most powerful computers to a halt if you’re sharing directories between the host and guest. For example, at my last company we developed Python apps and ran them in Docker for Mac containers by mounting the source code directory into the containers (so we wouldn’t need a build step) but as our project grew the filesystem event marshaling became exponentially slower until we eschewed Docker from our dev iteration loop entirely (the fidelity benefits weren’t worth the performance hit). Note: there are lots of projects and hacks that claim to solve this problem but none made an ounce of difference.

[lloeki]

The alternative is to use a performant file sharing system through the VM isolation. Some people use NFS, I personally use VMware Fusion + vmhgfs.

Sure it does not attempt to map fsevents<->inotify 1:1 but honestly I can live with that limitation given that it's a 10x performance increase compared to the DfM kitchensink.

I do go native darwin when I can / it makes sense.

[throwaway894345]

Is that something you can configure in DfM or are you saying you sort of roll your own DfM alternative? Also, what does "VM isolation" mean here? How is NFS or VMware Fusion more "isolated" than DfM?

[lloeki]

> Is that something you can configure in DfM

No

> or are you saying you sort of roll your own DfM alternative?

Yes, I set up a NixOS VM and use DOCKER_HOST=ssh://docker@<ip>

If you want to have it easy you can roll with lima/colima (but I found the fs sharing slower than vmhgfs)

> Also, what does "VM isolation" mean here?

The host/guest boundary. The guest is just like any another, remote machine. DsM adds smoke and mirrors to make it look like guest and host are one.

> How is NFS or VMware Fusion more "isolated" than DfM?

It's not, both are VMs and need a way to expose the host fs to the guest, NFS or vmhgfs are a means to that.

[throwaway894345]

Understood. Thanks for the explanation/clarification!

[jrochkind1]

> until we eschewed Docker from our dev iteration loop entirely

Can you say anything more about what you did instead, and how it ended up working out?

[throwaway894345]

We used native MacOS processes and it worked out fine. In practice I don't recall any bugs due to different behavior between our dev environment (MacOS) and our production environment (Linux) and we saved a ton of time during development. Docker just wasn't worth it. This worked for us because our app didn't depend on any platform specific behavior.

Of course, if you are using Go or some other language with a fast, static cross-compilation step, you don't need to mount a source code volume into your container, you can just rebuild the whole container image or rebuild on the host and `docker cp` the new binary onto the target container.