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Comment by fenwick67 | Hacker News Reader

Who is this article written for? There's a whole section on "What is memory?". If you are optimizing to remove memory leaks I really hope you already know what memory is.

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It was helpful for me. I don't have a CS background and I have been coding javascript for around 4 years now. There are a ton of other devs who don't have a proper knowledge of basics. If you are well versed then you can skip over to the next section.

In my experience there are (I don't know how many) some programmers who, given how they were taught/learnt, can do productive work but generally don't know computing/programming in the abstract e.g. Memory at the machine level, or type systems.

can do productive work but generally don't know computing/programming in the abstract

e.g. Memory at the machine level,

I think it's the other way around --- their usual level of abstraction is too high to understand such things...

or type systems

...and slightly too low to understand others.

if you program you have some concept of what memory is. I found the review of basic terms helpful in understanding the common JS leaks. YMMV

m with you pal, memory leaks are the last topic you touch when optimizing a function, usually you start lowering the execution time, followed by I/O blocking issues then proceed to server-related issues, network latency and after all that is covered you start looking for "memory leaks" so explaining memory is usually unnecessary at this point, since usually JR's devs are more focused on producing software rather than optimizing it.

IMHO memory leaks are important only on embedded software because you start there with a really low memory available for your software to run.

It's also very important when building long-running applications (e.g. electron applications).

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