Daniel, the author of curl, recently received the M1 version of Mac mini (8C CPU/16GB/1TB/8C GPU/1GbE) presented by community members. This device will be used for curl development.

According to Daniel’s description, although Apple has used curl for more than 20 years, they have never assisted, helped, or otherwise contributed to the development of curl, nor have they sponsored the curl team in any way, such as providing hardware. However, many users of curl on the Mac platform encounter platform-specific issues that are difficult to resolve without directly reproducing the issue.

So Daniel decided to accept this gift, because he believed that it would help curl. He also stated that he would give other curl committers access to the machine for development, debugging, etc., if needed.

At present, Daniel’s main development machine is equipped with a 10-year-old Intel CPU (i7-3770K CPU, 3.5GHz), running Linux system. He compares the speed of building curl on the two devices: