I believe this is a Haskell meme in hacker news. There is some truth to it, though. The meme is only relevant for memory allocations. In a lazy language you do

I believe this is a Haskell meme in hacker news. There is some truth to it, though. The meme is only relevant for memory allocations. In a lazy language you don’t always know what memory the runtime is holding on to as you haven’t consumed the full result of a function. In practice, you only encounter this problem in very rare situations. I have personally never had to care of bad performance in Haskell in any of my projects. In some projects I had to deal with high memory consumption problems. I could reason about why with ease: I was deciding very large JSON structures in hundreds of threads. Any other language would have had the same high memory profile.