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by outworlder 3139 days ago
Yes, Emacs stands for "eight megabytes and constantly swapping". How silly this sounds today.

I wonder why do those people even care.

The only time I look at my resource usage is when apps start to behave funny. Or when it's an app that I am developing. Other than that, why should one care?

One argument could be made that they are using memory wastefully. Not sure that's the case. The baseline memory consumption is higher, so what? It's a tradeoff. It's easier to build a better editor using browser-based tools, as much as I like Elisp. Over time Atom and VSCode will close the gap.

Now, if there is a memory leak, or memory increases non-linearly with the workload, than it could be a problem. VI and Emacs are pretty great with large files (Emacs not so great with long lines), browser-based editors usually do not work as well. But there is no reason they shouldn't, it just takes engineering effort.
2 comments
YaLTeR 3139 days ago
A text editor using 600 MB of RAM to open a file is ridiculous. That with a couple of Chrome tabs grinds my laptop to a halt.
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outworlder 3139 days ago
Why? Unless that pushes you to swap, that is not the cause for your slowness.
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pmoriarty 3139 days ago
"Yes, Emacs stands for "eight megabytes and constantly swapping". How silly this sounds today. I wonder why do those people even care."

Well, because if an application you're using is constantly swapping, it'll slow that application down to a crawl. This was especially true back in the day when disk was slow (and expensive.. as was RAM).

People today are used to being awash in resources. RAM is fast, plentiful, and cheap. Disks are relatively fast and cheap.

You have to imagine what it was like to live in a resource-constrained environment where you actually had to care about how much memory and disk you used, and how you were using it. These decisions had severe, immediately apparent practical consequences.

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outworlder 3139 days ago
Sorry, I wasn't clear enough.

What I meant to say was that "eight megabytes" sounds silly today. Who cares if an app uses 8MB today? The extrapolation is that it will be the same for Atom or other editors (I'd argue that it already is).

I created my first programs with a computer which had exactly 28815 bytes free when it booted up (out of a possible 64k). If you plugged in a floppy drive, the free memory dropped further.

So, I do understand resource constraints.

Btw,

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