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I'm curious -- why do you care how many megabytes or CPU cycles some random tool on your computer uses? Just seems like such a strange thing to say. I've never

I'm curious -- why do you care how many megabytes or CPU cycles some random tool on your computer uses? Just seems like such a strange thing to say. I've never, for example, preferred one media player over another based on it's algorithmic size, or bought a iPhone app because it used especially fewer screens. IDEs are just big text editors with a lot of stuff tacked on. I can see, perhaps, wanting to become VIM or EMACS master-of-the-universe, where you've macro'ed yourself to death and the entire planet can be controlled with just a few keystrokes, but for "regular" coding? What is it about an IDE that bugs you? I hope I didn't sound too critical. I'm just curious. I'll use any IDE anybody has as long as I can type code and compile it. Add in some macros? It's all good. Why in the heck would I want to dive deeper than that unless I had to? Why would I care? Why would, say, Eclipse be any worse or better than EMACs? Or VS any worse or better than Multi-Edit. I understand there are big fans of various tools. Feel free to jump in here and make your case. I've love to be mistaken. I just think this is like all the hoopla over Git -- it's a tool. I shouldn't be thinking about it very much. If I am it's not a very good tool.

fragmede 16y ago
> I'm curious -- why do you care how many megabytes or CPU cycles some random tool on your computer uses? Because those megabytes need to load from disk, and those CPU cycles need to cycle. Eclipse has some cool features, but if I have an aversion to loading the thing because it takes literally 5 minutes then I need a better tool. Leaving it always open isn't an option because of all the RAM it uses. I don't want another computer right now either.
- riffraff 16y ago
  have you tried headless eclipse and vim? http://eclim.org/ http://eclim.org/
  - fragmede 16y ago
    It's a neat idea, but running eclipse headless doesn't actually help the RAM/cpu cycles question.
spacemanaki 16y ago
Depending on your machine (this obviously doesn't matter much to someone with a beastly dev box), IDEs like Eclipse or Netbeans sometimes can't keep up with typing speed. This isn't a brag about WPM because I'm not that fast. But the code verification and error highlighting sometimes really slows things down which can result in hair-pulling. The best set up I think is something like Eclim - best of both worlds.
- djhworld 16y ago
  This is the reason why I've developed a dislike for IDEs What you say is correct, an IDE is just a text editor with a bunch of features tacked on, but those features lead to the environment becoming hungry for resources after every keyboard command you type. It doesn't surprise me to find Eclipse using 1GB of RAM after a few hours of development. My main development machine right now is a Macbook laptop, so I have limited resources in terms of RAM (2GB) and processor (2GHZ) and hate to see programs becoming greedy
  - Someone 16y ago
    If you have 2GB of RAM, why are you worried that the program that you basically bought and booted your computer for takes half of it? Are you sure that it would still use 1GB if you ran a program that needed memory harder?
    - dkarl 16y ago
      I have a Windows laptop with the same specs, and I can slow it down pretty easily. Chrome with thirty tabs -- switching to a tab I haven't looked at in a while sets the disk grinding and brings everything to a halt. When I start up Outlook, or just click on Outlook after waking up the laptop, there's a couple minutes I can spend getting coffee, because it takes take that long to switch to another program and start using it. (Waiting for Outlook to finish starting up is another few minutes after that.) Eclipse with fifty or more files open (damn these big Java frameworks) -- grind grind grind every time I switch between views, or at unexpected times while I'm typing. I wish I knew more about Windows, because when I look at the processes in the Task Manager, their combined memory footprint is well under 2GB, but all my programs become nearly unresponsive while the disk goes grind grind grind grind grind... what the hell is that about? Whether it's misconfiguration or some spyware crap my company installs on our laptops (I disabled the "backup" feature that just copy files around on the hard drive, but I'm sure there's more) it certainly helps if I keep the resource usage of my programs down. tl;dr: As long as people are bothered by performance problems, they'll worry about the resource consumption of their tools.
points 16y ago
One reason I don't use an IDE is the overhead in starting it up. I want a text editor to open now.
- gaius 16y ago
  Tell me about it. TOAD takes more resources to run on my PC than Oracle. Same with Eclipse. I remember when people joked that Emacs was a memory hog "eight megs and constantly swapping".
  - pjscott 16y ago
    There were more: Eventually Mallocs All Computer Storage. Emacs Makes A Computer Slow. About the only one that's still true now is this: Escape Meta Alt Control Shift.
    - leif 16y ago
      Only once did I see emacs malloc all of my ram, but it did it on the server and crashed it. No clue what happened, but I barely got top open to see it happen before the kernel panicked. A once-in-a-lifetime experience though, I start the emacs server on boot so I can start clients much faster, which means it's always running as long as my computer is on, and it's never had any issues other than that one time.
- jfb 16y ago
  When I was at Apple, I could build Emacs from source faster than IDEA would launch. As a twenty-year Emacs user, that sort of turned my world upside down.
  - masklinn 16y ago
    Yes, right...
  - bokchoi 16y ago
    It was most likely building an index of your source tree or something. IntelliJ starts up fast enough for me and I rarely restart my IDE anyway. IntelliJ stays open on my MacBook Pro for weeks.
jules 16y ago
It isn't about the size on disk or in memory or about the CPU cycles. It's about the complexity of using it. With millions of menus, commands and configuration options modern IDEs are hard to use. The complexity in menus, toolbars and panels is a distraction and uses up valuable screen space. IDEs are not optimized for the common case. For example adding an interface to your project in visual studio takes the same steps as adding a "ADO.NET Self-Tracing Entity Generator": right click on the project in the solution explorer, choose Add, choose New Item, choose Interface, click Add. At every step in this process you have to choose from a list of about 10 options. So by choosing something else when you're given these options you can probably reach about 10000 different end results. Surely adding an interface is what you want more than 1 out of 10000 times, so why bury it under so many steps?
projectileboy 16y ago
Agreed. I love good tools, and I hate bad tools, just like everybody else. But if the tech value index (= time gained by using tool / time spent talking about the tool) < 1, then the tool starts to smell bad.

fragmede 16y ago

> I'm curious -- why do you care how many megabytes or CPU cycles some random tool on your computer uses? Because those megabytes need to load from disk, and those CPU cycles need to cycle. Eclipse has some cool features, but if I have an aversion to loading the thing because it takes literally 5 minutes then I need a better tool. Leaving it always open isn't an option because of all the RAM it uses. I don't want another computer right now either.

riffraff 16y ago
have you tried headless eclipse and vim? http://eclim.org/ http://eclim.org/
- fragmede 16y ago
  It's a neat idea, but running eclipse headless doesn't actually help the RAM/cpu cycles question.

spacemanaki 16y ago

Depending on your machine (this obviously doesn't matter much to someone with a beastly dev box), IDEs like Eclipse or Netbeans sometimes can't keep up with typing speed. This isn't a brag about WPM because I'm not that fast. But the code verification and error highlighting sometimes really slows things down which can result in hair-pulling. The best set up I think is something like Eclim - best of both worlds.

djhworld 16y ago
This is the reason why I've developed a dislike for IDEs What you say is correct, an IDE is just a text editor with a bunch of features tacked on, but those features lead to the environment becoming hungry for resources after every keyboard command you type. It doesn't surprise me to find Eclipse using 1GB of RAM after a few hours of development. My main development machine right now is a Macbook laptop, so I have limited resources in terms of RAM (2GB) and processor (2GHZ) and hate to see programs becoming greedy
- Someone 16y ago
  If you have 2GB of RAM, why are you worried that the program that you basically bought and booted your computer for takes half of it? Are you sure that it would still use 1GB if you ran a program that needed memory harder?
  - dkarl 16y ago
    I have a Windows laptop with the same specs, and I can slow it down pretty easily. Chrome with thirty tabs -- switching to a tab I haven't looked at in a while sets the disk grinding and brings everything to a halt. When I start up Outlook, or just click on Outlook after waking up the laptop, there's a couple minutes I can spend getting coffee, because it takes take that long to switch to another program and start using it. (Waiting for Outlook to finish starting up is another few minutes after that.) Eclipse with fifty or more files open (damn these big Java frameworks) -- grind grind grind every time I switch between views, or at unexpected times while I'm typing. I wish I knew more about Windows, because when I look at the processes in the Task Manager, their combined memory footprint is well under 2GB, but all my programs become nearly unresponsive while the disk goes grind grind grind grind grind... what the hell is that about? Whether it's misconfiguration or some spyware crap my company installs on our laptops (I disabled the "backup" feature that just copy files around on the hard drive, but I'm sure there's more) it certainly helps if I keep the resource usage of my programs down. tl;dr: As long as people are bothered by performance problems, they'll worry about the resource consumption of their tools.

points 16y ago

One reason I don't use an IDE is the overhead in starting it up. I want a text editor to open now.

gaius 16y ago
Tell me about it. TOAD takes more resources to run on my PC than Oracle. Same with Eclipse. I remember when people joked that Emacs was a memory hog "eight megs and constantly swapping".
- pjscott 16y ago
  There were more: Eventually Mallocs All Computer Storage. Emacs Makes A Computer Slow. About the only one that's still true now is this: Escape Meta Alt Control Shift.
  - leif 16y ago
    Only once did I see emacs malloc all of my ram, but it did it on the server and crashed it. No clue what happened, but I barely got top open to see it happen before the kernel panicked. A once-in-a-lifetime experience though, I start the emacs server on boot so I can start clients much faster, which means it's always running as long as my computer is on, and it's never had any issues other than that one time.
jfb 16y ago
When I was at Apple, I could build Emacs from source faster than IDEA would launch. As a twenty-year Emacs user, that sort of turned my world upside down.
- masklinn 16y ago
  Yes, right...
- bokchoi 16y ago
  It was most likely building an index of your source tree or something. IntelliJ starts up fast enough for me and I rarely restart my IDE anyway. IntelliJ stays open on my MacBook Pro for weeks.

jules 16y ago

It isn't about the size on disk or in memory or about the CPU cycles. It's about the complexity of using it. With millions of menus, commands and configuration options modern IDEs are hard to use. The complexity in menus, toolbars and panels is a distraction and uses up valuable screen space. IDEs are not optimized for the common case. For example adding an interface to your project in visual studio takes the same steps as adding a "ADO.NET Self-Tracing Entity Generator": right click on the project in the solution explorer, choose Add, choose New Item, choose Interface, click Add. At every step in this process you have to choose from a list of about 10 options. So by choosing something else when you're given these options you can probably reach about 10000 different end results. Surely adding an interface is what you want more than 1 out of 10000 times, so why bury it under so many steps?

projectileboy 16y ago

Agreed. I love good tools, and I hate bad tools, just like everybody else. But if the tech value index (= time gained by using tool / time spent talking about the tool) < 1, then the tool starts to smell bad.