Picoscope- yay or nay?

[voltsandjolts]

IIRC Picoscope 7 is an electron app (or maybe it's picolog, or both, hmm)

https://www.electronjs.org/blog/apple-silicon

What about Rosetta 2?

Rosetta 2 is Apple's latest iteration of their Rosetta technology, which allows you to run x64 Intel applications on their new arm64 Apple Silicon hardware. Although we believe that x64 Electron apps will run under Rosetta 2, there are some important things to note (and reasons why you should ship a native arm64 binary).

Your app's performance will be significantly degraded. Electron / V8 uses JIT compilation for JavaScript, and due to how Rosetta works, you will effectively be running JIT twice (once in V8 and once in Rosetta).

You lose the benefit of new technology in Apple Silicon, such as the increased memory page size.

Did we mention that the performance will be significantly degraded?

So, if PicoScope 7 is an x86 electron app on the mac m1/2, it might explain the slow menu behaviour David has...may be some of the crashes too 

[David Aurora]

IIRC Picoscope 7 is an electron app (or maybe it's picolog, or both, hmm)

https://www.electronjs.org/blog/apple-silicon

What about Rosetta 2?

Rosetta 2 is Apple's latest iteration of their Rosetta technology, which allows you to run x64 Intel applications on their new arm64 Apple Silicon hardware. Although we believe that x64 Electron apps will run under Rosetta 2, there are some important things to note (and reasons why you should ship a native arm64 binary).

Your app's performance will be significantly degraded. Electron / V8 uses JIT compilation for JavaScript, and due to how Rosetta works, you will effectively be running JIT twice (once in V8 and once in Rosetta).

You lose the benefit of new technology in Apple Silicon, such as the increased memory page size.

Did we mention that the performance will be significantly degraded?

So, if PicoScope 7 is an x86 electron app on the mac m1/2, it might explain the slow menu behaviour David has...may be some of the crashes too 

FFS 

If this is correct, that would mean they've been actively developing for outdated hardware for over 2 years 

I know they're watching this thread (they mentioned having seen my video in an email, and it's unlisted on Youtube and only linked here), maybe they could chime in to confirm or deny that? And if it is indeed the case, I then wonder what the path to Apple silicon support is going to look like.

[voltsandjolts]

FYI I'm no expert on PC software, so this post might be full of misleading crap, but here goes...

I've had a look at PicoLog and Picoscope 7 just now. PicoLog is an electron application.

I was wrong about Picoscope 7, it's actually a C# application, not an electron app.

On Windows it seems to be using the microsoft C# JIT compiler, as you would expect.

On mac it uses the mono JIT compiler but mono's supported platforms don't include mac arm, only mac x86-64.
So, on your m1 your likely running PicoScope 7 software on the mono compiler which is JIT'ing to x86-64 code which is running on the Rosetta thingy to translate to arm64.
Doesn't sound 'snappy' to me, and you're probably waiting for mono to add support for mac arm to see better performance. Not much Pico can do about it.

If this is correct, that would mean they've been actively developing for outdated hardware for over 2 years 

To be fair, they're targeting the majority of mac users who will be using mac x86-64.

[David Aurora]

FYI I'm no expert on PC software, so this post might be full of misleading crap, but here goes...

I've had a look at PicoLog and Picoscope 7 just now. PicoLog is an electron application.

I was wrong about Picoscope 7, it's actually a C# application, not an electron app.

On Windows it seems to be using the microsoft C# JIT compiler, as you would expect.

On mac it uses the mono JIT compiler but mono's supported platforms don't include mac arm, only mac x86-64.
So, on your m1 your likely running PicoScope 7 software on the mono compiler which is JIT'ing to x86-64 code which is running on the Rosetta thingy to translate to arm64.
Doesn't sound 'snappy' to me, and you're probably waiting for mono to add support for mac arm to see better performance. Not much Pico can do about it.

If this is correct, that would mean they've been actively developing for outdated hardware for over 2 years 

To be fair, they're targeting the majority of mac users who will be using mac x86-64.

Thanks for the crash course!

As for the target market, that still seems ass backwards to me. They could have drawn a line in the sand and gone "Use V6 wherever you want, but the new version is built for new hardware". What's the point of new software if it's built on the premise that you're only going to use it on old hardware? If not now, I wonder when they will make the leap to supporting modern processors

[voltsandjolts]

If not now, I wonder when they will make the leap to supporting modern processors

Pico chose to hitch their wagon to mono for cross-platform, so it's really a question for mono.

If I were Pico, I think I would have went with Qt, for fast binaries running native on all supported platforms. Which sounds ideal for a 'scope app. I see Qt support mac arm. Anyway, I'm sure they had reasons, hiring C# programmers is probably easier than for C++/Qt.

[David Aurora]

If not now, I wonder when they will make the leap to supporting modern processors

Pico chose to hitch their wagon to mono for cross-platform, so it's really a question for mono.

If I were Pico, I think I would have went with Qt, for fast binaries running native on all supported platforms. Which sounds ideal for a 'scope app. I see Qt support mac arm. Anyway, I'm sure they had reasons, hiring C# programmers is probably easier than for C++/Qt.

Kind of circles back to the earlier parts of this thread I guess- why not just say "Windows only" and do one thing properly rather than claim it works on other operating systems but not pull it off 

Hopefully when I get around to an Intel test it works better, although that's kind of useless to me given I only want it for portability with a MacBook Pro (M1), not chained to the Intel box on the desk. I guess if it does though there's a chance that maybe someday the third party they're relying on sorts out the issue and it's usable with a modern laptop, fingers crossed

[JPortici]

If not now, I wonder when they will make the leap to supporting modern processors

Pico chose to hitch their wagon to mono for cross-platform, so it's really a question for mono.

If I were Pico, I think I would have went with Qt, for fast binaries running native on all supported platforms. Which sounds ideal for a 'scope app. I see Qt support mac arm. Anyway, I'm sure they had reasons, hiring C# programmers is probably easier than for C++/Qt.

Most probably.
Also maybe since they have a long history of windows products they may have had a long history of programming with Visual studio and .net, using mono for multiplatform seems the path of least resistance

[voltsandjolts]

Kind of circles back to the earlier parts of this thread I guess- why not just say "Windows only" and do one thing properly rather than claim it works on other operating systems but not pull it off 

They should explicity say "Mac x86-64" on their download page, rather than the generic "Mac", which only leads to disappointment.

Hopefully when I get around to an Intel test it works better, although that's kind of useless to me given I only want it for portability with a MacBook Pro (M1), not chained to the Intel box on the desk. I guess if it does though there's a chance that maybe someday the third party they're relying on sorts out the issue and it's usable with a modern laptop, fingers crossed

Yup. Thanks for having the patience to stick with it, hopefully things improve.

[David Aurora]

Just installed it on the Intel Mac while waiting for a customer to arrive and gave it a quick go. Menus still appear laggy, possibly a little less though? Hit the reset config button a handful of times without a crash so far. Haven't actually probed anything yet as I only have 5 minutes right now, but will try to actually measure some stuff later and see if it behaves better on Intel

[David Aurora]

OK, I reckon there's definitely merit to the mono theory. I finally gave the Picoscope a run on the Intel machine today, and only had one crash (not sure what triggered it, but it was pretty random rather than anything that was crashing on the M1 processor). Menus still seem a little laggy to open/close, but otherwise it worked pretty well.

Actually, it worked well enough that without even thinking about it I left it set up for the next thing I worked on and did that job on the Pico rather than the usual gear. Might not sound like a big deal, but compared to my first impressions of this thing that's a pretty big step to just use it happily for actual work.

According to an email I got yesterday the number entry thing should be a straightforward fix.

If at some point the software works properly on a modern Mac I'd actually be pretty stoked with this as a mobile setup for job callouts.

[Xandinator]

I wouldn't give up on them, they've come from not planning to support Intel Macs back then to a reliably working version.

[David Aurora]

I wouldn't give up on them, they've come from not planning to support Intel Macs back then to a reliably working version.

... 2 years after Apple switched away from Intel. I wouldn't really consider that much of a win 😂

I guess now it's a waiting game to see if they plan on making these work on current model Macs. It'd be good if they figure this out and release an update soon to address it, but failing that I reckon they're better off just throwing in the towel and re-labelling their stuff as Windows only. I think it does more harm to their brand than good to keep swinging and missing like this

[voltsandjolts]

Picoscope-7 uses the Mono .NET implementation for cross-platform portability. I don't see much chatter about Mono adding support for macOS ARM64. In fact, there is more talk of 'Microsoft .NET Core' (which has been renamed to 'Microsoft .NET') being the future for C# cross-platform, so maybe Mono is going to die.

On a brighter note, the recent Microsoft .NET 7 runtime does natively support macOS ARM64. I have no idea how much work it would be for Picoscope to be moved from Mono to Microsoft .NET 7, but it could be the way forward. I'm not sure which version of .NET Picoscope-7 uses on Windows, hmm, need to check. If it's .NET 5 or higher then moving to .NET 7 (and so gaining macOS ARM64 support) should be fairly straightforward.