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by tomp 2288 days ago
Semi-joking, but the problem is real for me. I've a 2013 13' MacBook Pro with 8GB RAM, and my system can't cope with my workflow ... tens of tabs in Safari, webapps in Chrome (YouTube, Google Docs, ...), Eclipse with Scala / Java, ... it's a huge struggle.
1 comments
inertiatic 2288 days ago
I was handed a 2017 MacBook Pro with 8GB of RAM at my current job while waiting for my actual laptop to be delivered, and it was a nightmare.

I keep a lot of tabs open to look things up, but nothing excessive on that machine. I also run VSCode or Pycharm and would also bring up 5-10 containers at times.

It seriously hurt not only my productivity but also my mood afterwards just by having to put up with it for weeks.

Unless you're a very basic user I don't get why you would settle for 8GB in 2020. 8 gigs of RAM cost basically nothing, it's not worth changing your workflow in the slightest to work around that artificial limitation.

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72deluxe 2288 days ago
It is odd because these memory issues are very real, but if you ever say "wow, devs are getting lazy and these 'desktop' apps that rebundle Chrome are really killing my machine (eg. Slack, Skype) with inordinate quantities of logic in javascript" you get shouted down.

It's bizarre. If everyone used the native toolkits we'd have far less memory usage and everyone (even the memory-constrained) would have a good experience.

Also, with these memory hogs they will do a lot of allocation and deallocation. This is also a problem with interpreted languages. And allocation is the enemy of speed, and energy usage. It'll destroy your daily battery expectancy as everything gets interpreted.

Sad.

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Joeri 2288 days ago
I remember feeling the same when I was forced to upgrade from 32 mb of ram to 128 mb of ram to run the combination of browser, chat and IDE on windows NT4, back when they moved from hand-optimized assembly to mass-produced C++ for most software.

With every layer of abstraction added to ease development the hardware requirements go up. You can build things fast, or you can build fast things, doing both is tricky.

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