Why is DrRacket so much faster on Apple M1/M2?

General
1

I have two systems I use primarily for coding: an Apple MacBook Air M2 and a Lenovo P16 (i9-12950HX + Nvidia A4500). On the M2, DrRacket FLYS. It's nearly as smooth and as responsive as Sublime Text. Executing Racket code is also very fast, very little delays anywhere. On my P16, at the same resolution, it's quite slow. Scrolling is choppy, overall performance isn't great. Why is there such a huge difference in performance? Is it just an optimization problem on Intel, or is Apple silicon really that much faster to execute the same code?

2

Also, opening DrRacket on the M2 takes less than 3 seconds. On my PC, using a very fast nvme gen 4, it's more like 6-8 seconds.

3

Others probably know better, but the M2 machine likely has much faster memory access and a much faster SSD, which would affect DrRacket startup a lot.

4

Opening Dr Racket takes about 4 seconds for me, on a c. 2019 (not brand new but not super old) Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon Gen 6.

This is running Linux, not Windows. How about you?

My experience is that Windows can be significantly slower at launching programs and opening many files. [Anectdata: The magit for Emacs wrapper for git is waaay slower on Windows; its author despairs of making it faster, there. It e.g. runs git log .... frequently to populate its UI.]

This might account for Dr Racket startup, as well as loading/starting other Racket programs?

But that wouldn't explain warm-cache, pure run time, I guess.

And that wouldn't account for things like scrolling. That seems like it would be more related to Racket's support for the GUI systems on various OSs?

EDIT for p.s.: It could also be that, yes, M2 is just much faster. I'd be surprised if that's the entire story, but it could be a big chunk.

5

It's slow on Windows only. I run on Linux et MacOS as well and it's fast. There's probably a bit of both. I find the M2 faster than most of my systems on general tasks. But DrRacket is running very slow on all my win systems, especially when I'm running at higher resolution (4k or over). At 2k res it's OK but still not nearly as fast as other OSes.

6

I use Racket on my two linux PCs. It usually takes less than 2 seconds to launch a DrRacket instance.

You can open or use Racket in wsl2 on windows, and see if there is any noticeable difference.