~/lager $ cat posts/lager-ruined-me-for-vendor-tooling.md
Lager has ruined me for vendor tooling
We really need to support arm64.
Akbar Dhanaliwala2 min
I use Lager for everything now. Development, test scripting, CI pipelines. There’s a bit of upfront setup — never more than a couple of hours — but the effort is worth it, because I feel way more productive once it’s done. My fingers know lager debug flash, lager uart, lager python, lager supply. The vendor stack underneath — debuggers, the front panel of the supply, the knobs on the scope — has mostly gone from muscle memory.
I noticed this recently when I was trying to help someone bring up a board I work with every day, except on their machine, with their tools. I was basically useless. They were using SmartSnippets Studio (kill me), and I was having an internal debate on whether I was actually going to need to install it to help.
Which is, on one hand, a kind of compliment to Lager. The whole point of using it is that you stop thinking about what’s underneath. Once your hands learn the interface, the magic incantations get paged out. For some engineers I’ve met, the incantation is the point. It’s their moat. But I want that brain space back for other things.
On the other hand, it’s a real cost when I’m trying to collaborate with someone who hasn’t installed Lager yet. The cleanest fix is the obvious one: get them on Lager too. We support x86 already, so on Linux that’s a short conversation. But most of the people I work with are on a Mac, and we don’t support arm64 yet. So I’m stuck in their vendor stack instead of pulling them into mine.
Which is where Docker matters. Lager runs in a container, so installing it on your laptop doesn’t touch the rest of your setup. Whatever archaic vendor environment you have spent years curating keeps working, exactly the way it did yesterday. Lager just lives next to it. When you’re done, you stop the container and it’s gone. You can keep one foot in each world for as long as you want — which, unless you’re a masochist, should be less than a day.
Anyway, the one silver lining of being forced to install SmartSnippets Studio (I had to eventually) is that getting Lager working on arm64 is now a priority on our roadmap.