Ask HN: Why is Atom a whopping 845 MB on my Mac?
That is insane for a text editor. For comparison VS Code is only 192 MB on my Mac.
When I write a C or C++ app, if I use libcurl and a library I’m using does as well, it links to the same shared libcurl library (mapped in RAM) as all other running processes do as well. With NPM, you can’t share libraries across process space and you’ll often even find the same packed being imported multiple times within the same app. In JS, it’s like statically linking all of your dependencies, but even less efficient. It can be argued that this is as good as it is bad.
When you build a code ecosystem atop JS, the underlying inefficiencies multiply as each layer is added. VS Code is more efficient, but even 192MB is still pathetically bloated.
Expect Atom to eventually approach and surpass 1GB of RAM, not less... at least in the short term.
Bloated for a text editor.
That's literally comparing...apples and cars. I would be shocked if a car only had 291 parts.
Snaps are similar to Mac packages, since they bundle most of the libraries together with them.
It's a clever marketing.
Downvotes for pointing out the flaw in marketing vs reality.
FWIW, I am shopping for low-end laptops for kids in my extended family, and Dad could use a new machine, but he wants Windows OS. These machines spec out to 4GB RAM, 64 or 128GB eMMC or SSD.
Big apps are still a huge problems.
Edit: I made it all the way through a college CS program just fine using an Acer Aspire one netbook with 4G of RAM.
the kids should be glad to have any computer a relative will buy for them, but it's probably wasteful to purchase such an underprovisioned machine for an adult who will actually take care of it.
I found it difficult to justify the more beefy machine aside from RAM, and paying $200+ for 4gb more RAM is silly, so he'll probably get the cheaper option and upgrade RAM if it becomes a problem.
The sad part is that Windows takes nearly half of that, by he said he only needs word processing, viewing pictures of grandkids, and some light browsing. That same thing was quite reasonable a few years ago on 2gb, but now everything is bloated to the point where 4gb is feeling tight...
As a developer, I consider 16gb to be a minimum for my dev machine, but why do basic computers need 8gb these days? Tablets do about the same workload, but only need 3-4gb max...
> why do basic computers need 8gb these days? Tablets do about the same workload, but only need 3-4gb max...
mobile software is still designed pretty differently than its desktop/laptop counterparts. take the browser for instance, probably the most widely used software by light users. while i type this post, firefox is taking up over 1GB just to have five tabs open, and it seems to use 100-200 MB more for each additional tab. that's a lot of memory, but the upside is that each tab is fully loaded in memory and can be switched to in an instant. on my phone, firefox uses way less memory, but only the current tab (or maybe a couple recently viewed ones) is actually loaded in memory. switching tabs on mobile triggers a page reload from disk or over the network, orders of magnitude slower than the desktop experience. certainly there are some lazy devs out there that waste our memory, but at the core there is a intrinsic tradeoff between memory usage and performace. it's always faster to load from memory than to read from storage. i doubt you would want to trade desktop/laptop class performance for mobile class memory footprint on your main device.