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by josephg 95 days ago
Good. So many software developers have gotten so lazy with RAM usage in the past few decades. I hope the Neo is a kick in the pants to get everyone in the Apple ecosystem to take memory usage seriously.

More efficient software benefits everyone.
2 comments
p_ing 94 days ago
> So many software developers have gotten so lazy with RAM usage in the past few decades.

Fewer developers want to write ASM or C, today. Slower to market, slower to roll out features, etc. While that may seem like a good thing, and probably could be, the market doesn't like it.

Developer choose heavy weight frameworks or don't make use of modern features in said frameworks to improve performance. And in some cases, performance can be 'good enough'. If I pretended to be a developer, if my app performs well enough, it's not my problem what else is running on your system. Besides, the OS governs it all regardless.

That said, macOS has a terrible memory leak _somewhere_ that impacts even OOTB apps and this hasn't been corrected for the last two major releases.

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josephg 94 days ago
You don't need to program in ASM or C to write a memory efficient program. Swift, Go, Rust, C++ and C# are all reasonably memory efficient at the scales we're talking about.

Usually you just have to actually look at memory usage and trim the obvious fat. But so many developers these days treat memory as an infinite resource, and don't have a clue how to use profiling tools to even investigate memory usage. That and, maybe stop shipping a copy of Chrome with your application.

I'm hopeful that LLMs will improve the state of application development. Claude can write sloppy code, but it also knows how to write rust and swift, and it knows a lot of tricks for optimisation if you prompt it.

There's 3rd party libraries which know how to interact with spotify. I wonder how many claude code tokens it would take to make a simple, native spotify client. Or discord client. Or client for Teams or Slack.

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dawnerd 95 days ago
It's really quite bad. 'Telegram Lite' is using 1.16GB with just a single chat vs Signal using 193MB. Somehow vscode (including their renderers) manages to come in pretty low compared to even Apples native apps.
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m-schuetz 95 days ago
> Somehow vscode (including their renderers) manages to come in pretty low compared to even Apples native apps.

Because the issue isn't electron, it's not freeing resources which you can do in any language/platform.

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josephg 95 days ago
> vs Signal using 193MB

That’s still an order of magnitude worse than it should be. You don’t need 200mb of ram for a chat app.

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