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by a_wild_dandan 1002 days ago
HN's memory usage obsession is basically a meme now. You'll see vastly more JS consternation here for RAM usage than praise for benefits like getting MVPs up stunningly fast, having a gigantic hiring pool, using one codebase to deploy on every major platform, etc. (These critics are often ironically the same folks who endorse avoiding premature optimization.)

And hey, memory usage can be crucial! But the community's distorted emphasis on it is almost comical, when compared to reality. I think it's an understandable perspective, given some devs' proximity to bare metal. But man I wish it wasn't such an omnipresent refrain here. :/

2 comments

It’s great for bootstrapping. A $5 droplet at Digital Ocean is more affordable than $25 per month. The same is true if you take advantage of lambdas. Quick boot up. Able to do more CPU work per unit of time. All because it’s fast and low memory.

Also the dependency world isn’t as messed up at it is in Typescript. I’ve been spending the better part of my time fixing dependabot issues. Some package I don’t know about is causing me to have to upgrade everything. Crazy stuff.

Is it really meme? There is often opinion that developer and business friendly process is more important than user experience and energy resources.

I do not think that there is single narrative.