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Comment by clashmeifyoucan | Hacker News Reader

I have been using Jetbrains IDEs for a long time now, started with PyCharm and made my way through Webstorm to CLion for uni. It's great, but the RAM cost has been too high for me.

I've been slightly switching the opposite way, using vim more and more for smaller stuff and opening the IDE only for larger projects or work stretches. I definitely love the value of vim as a nifty tool, my workflow is noticeably faster.

As an aside, that cheeky :wq is not missed by me at all, :x all the way!

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As for ram usage, I currently have two huge java projects open, and three elm/frontend projects with all the shared packages opened as modules, and it's about 5GB. While it's certainly more than a text editor (still less than chrome lol), is it really so bad? My laptop got 64GB of ram and 34GB of those are sitting unused and 8GB is just cache. I actually prefer it to use more ram than having to recompute stuff or load from disk.

> and it's about 5GB.

IMO yes. My machine has like 8 total and Chrome monopolizes quite a bit.

and lately for me it's been Zoom and Discord on top of Chrome and Jetbrains. Trying to write code while on a call is a recipe for memory giving up.

The computer I bought as a "poor" (western) student in 2012 had 16 GB ram. I can't really see any professionals stuck with 8 GB ram nowadays. As I said, even Chrome will kill a computer with that amount.

So I can see it being an issue, I just think an IDE isn't optimized for that kind of usage, I guess? I acknowledge I'm speaking from privilege here, though, and that probably non-professional users would like to use this software as well.

Fair—I think this ties into a difference into the ubiquity of powerful systems and internet in the west. For example, up until not too long ago, I could not just blindly afford to have a 2GB visual studio toolset downloading in the background for rust without completely blocking the wifi. In general though, that size is literally peanuts.

For what it's worth, I just took a glance at required PyCharm specs.¹ They recommend 8GB and minimum 2GB ram, which seems a bit dumbed down. I can't imagine anyone being able to properly run it without at least 4 gigs of ram even if they have nothing else running.

[1] https://www.jetbrains.com/pycharm/download/#section=windows

well, there is your answer. You can afford to have it open, I'm running on 8GB ram so the jetbrains ram usage has a considerable cost.

Are you still in school? If yes, well just take RAM into consideration next time. If no, get your boss to buy you a decent laptop immediately.

yep first year. Funnily enough, I have a laptop grant from uni, waiting to see how those ARM Macs turn out.

Or consider getting a better PC with more ram and faster nvme drives for the same price.

If you are a developer and you can't afford a machine that has more than 8 gigs of RAM, what are you even doing?

studying :)

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