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Comment by matsemann | Hacker News Reader

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.

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> 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.

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 :)

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.

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