Switching to a Mac

I've been developing with RoR -v=2.02 on my winxp laptop and I'm running a scripts very frequently.

rake db:migrate:reset and ruby script/runner script/import/project.rb and most importantly rake test:units.

Running these commands is slow.

Painfully slow.

So slow so that I took out a watch and timed it.

It takes 29 seconds for the environment to spin up and then between 1 and 3 seconds to run the actual scripts. You can tell because the first thing most of these scripts do after requiring the framework is printing to standard out. But nothing prints for 29 seconds!!!

So that is 29 seconds of nothing and then a flash of my program running. It got really tedious so I decided to investigate. I started with 2 premises:

1. The average developer would probably not put up with this and still say Rails was cool
2. I don't remember Rails being like this when I developed on linux.

Google showed me a pile of web pages where people were complaining about rails scripts being slow. They all had one thing in common... They were running windows.

So I decided to burn an hour and try out my project on my wife's Mackbook Pro. And the scripts scream. That 29 second delay is eliminated. And the added bonus is, TextMate is very slick and does not spike the CPU the way Aptana Studio does when I say, click on a tab.

So I'm switching to my wife's mac. I'm assuming she'll like this because it means I'll finish my thesis about 3 years faster.