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Very timely article. But I have been told to shut up and use Atom/VSCode/Slack like everyone else and upgrade hardware if software runs slow.

I find memory/cpu efficient applications not just useful but respectful to users specially when upgrading hardware is not possible due to financial or policy reasons.

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We're also in an era when the speed of laptop and desktop CPUs has essentially stalled. Put another way, if our apps hog more resources there aren't necessarily faster machines we can buy.

Yes, this is extremely important to remember. The days of "who cares if we use a few extra bytes of RAM or a few extra CPU cycles here and there as computers will be twice as fast and have twice as much memory this time next year" are long over. And with the huge push for mobile and slim, portable computers, power efficiency is paramount as users really care about battery life. Yes, sure you can get a more powerful laptop than your nice, sleek, portable macbook air, but it's going to weigh 5x as much and the battery life will suck, especially if you actually use that power. People want to be able to use their CPU and RAM to run multiple applications efficiently, not waste it on a few laggy memory and CPU hogs.

I'm running VSCode and Slack on an 11" MB AIR with 8GB Ram (Early 2014). I'm not really seeing performance problems, even with about 40 tabs open on my Google Chrome. While I do occasionally see Slack occasionally popping up on my Activity Monitor, as a user I don't feel I've actually been negatively impacted by this.

What kind of hardware are you on as a developer?

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