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> the biggest pain point for software developers is the small amount of RAM Software developers thinking that 16GB is a small amount of RAM is why all of our s

> the biggest pain point for software developers is the small amount of RAM Software developers thinking that 16GB is a small amount of RAM is why all of our software is fat barges of bloat now. Y'all, this prophecy is entirely self-fulfilling. Please stop.

secondcoming 5y ago
16GB isn't a lot when developing, but that doesn't mean your final code should need 16GB to run. My old desktop has 32GB and my laptop has 128GB, both at their motherboard limits.
simonh 5y ago
The memory needed to efficiently compile an application isn’t the same as the memory needed to run it.
- hulitu 5y ago
  > The memory needed to efficiently compile an application isn’t the same as the memory needed to run it. This is becoming more and more false. See Firefox for example.
  - simonh 5y ago
    You need 8GB of memory to efficiently compile Firefox, but you can run it in a lot less than that. Fundamentally when compiling the application you aren't running the application, you're running the compiler. They are different pieces of software with independent resource requirements. Even if they happen to be similar, that's really just a coincidence.
nikita2206 5y ago
It’s just not enough when it’s a multi-service backend that you want to run on your local machine, plus IDE, a browser, and a few well known electron/react native apps that play music and let you chat with your colleagues.
- qeternity 5y ago
  > and a few well known electron/react native apps that play music and let you chat with your colleagues. This is the whole point: devs with 32gb/64gb machines looking at their own app taking 1gb aren't going to realize that for many people this is 25% of the available non-os ram (8g system with 4g free non kernel / other.
scoopertrooper 5y ago
This is ridiculous nonsense written by, presumably, someone who isn't a professional software developer. Software developers often have to run several emulators (e.g. Docker Desktop, Android, and iOS emulators), hundreds of Chrome tabs, compilers, heavy 'ol IDEs, Microsoft freakin' Teams, and a bunch of other stuff concurrently. 16 GB is just enough for many workloads, but it's easy to see use cases in which would exceed that.
- horns4lyfe 5y ago
  Hundreds of chrome tabs? lol, ya, that’s on them.
- darthrupert 5y ago
  People should be literally at software houses' headquarters with pitchforks and torches, revolting against such wastes of resources.
  - hulitu 5y ago
    It won't help. There seems to be a trend in SW development: if the program has an address space of 64 GB the programm shall use it. It does not matter that the program will not run alone on the system. Some years ago, when the first version of Crysis was released, it could not even run on the fastest computers available but it was celebrated as a real achievement. This is the spirit.
- emodendroket 5y ago
  I agree. But isn't part of the design conceit that the storage is fast enough that swapping isn't as painful as it would otherwise be?
- rak1507 5y ago
  This just proves the parent commenter right. 'Software developers often have to run...' - yes! That is the problem! People shouldn't have to run all of that, but they do. If people thought about what they really needed rather than just buying more hardware, the world would be a better place. (Also, I doubt you need hundreds of chrome tabs + heavy IDEs, a couple of tabs + <insert lightweight editor of choice> works just fine)
hdjjhhvvhga 5y ago
I understand why you're saying that but when you try do develop on Xcode running an emulator and at the same try to use your machine normally (keeping some tabs open, listening to some music etc.), suddenly 8 GB seems like very little. Moreover, when you develop for a platform like iOS, you have very limited control on how fat your application will be.
javchz 5y ago
A tradition for desktop software (mostly 3rd party) was to develop for "future hardware" from the moment you're developing, as Moore's law was a good rule of thumb to predict the future. But for reasons RAM and CPU performance have kept stagnated without a lot of changes for around 10 years (until recently with Ryzen 5000, Intel 12th, and Apple M1). Still I find funny you could buy a 16GB RAM Macbook 13" in 2012 as the top model... and today 16GB is still it's the max capacity of the line. To give a point of reference the 2002 Powerbook the Max RAM capacity was 1GB.
throw0101a 5y ago
> Software developers thinking that 16GB is a small amount of RAM […] It is… for development. Which is what software developers do and what they often buy hardware for. Whether it's too little for the apps that they develop to run on users' machines is a separate question.
yowlingcat 5y ago
I dunno man, are you sure about this kind of supply side thinking? I'm much more inclined to assume demand side causality here. Which is to say: software has become "fat barges of bloat" because the /consumers/ (not producers) of said software are okay with it.
renewiltord 5y ago
I’m not in the business of not using RAM. I’m in the business of making money. If you don’t want to use RAM, apply market pressure in that direction. The truth is, you have very little market power, so I genuinely don’t give a fuck. I’m not interested in selling a $1.99 product to a guy with a $199 device. I’m interested in selling a $199 product to a guy with a $3999 device. That’s the guy I’m going to listen to.
- csdvrx 5y ago
  > I’m not interested in selling a $1.99 product to a guy with a $199 device. I’m interested in selling a $199 product to a guy with a $3999 device. I love the way you're thinking (and presenting it) > That’s the guy I’m going to listen to. You and me both! Saving a few dollars on RAM is penny wise, pound foolish.
- hulitu 5y ago
  The problem is: you will be selling a $199 product to a guy with a $3999 device, but the product will be used on a $399 device because the guy who bought your product is not the same using it.
znpy 5y ago
> Software developers thinking Please restrict this to web developers. My decade old ThinkPad x200s with two Core2 Duo cores and 8gb of ram and an SSD can do most things very well, except browsing websites. Loading a large book in PDF format? no problem. Opening ten years of email in Claws Mail? sure thing. Opening the same amount of e-mail in thunderbird? A little sweaty, but why not? Playing mp3 files over bluetooth? Yeah! Wanna write a document in libreoffice writer? As long as you're a bit patient. Chat with other people using Telegram or Hexchat? No problem. ... What? You want to browse the web? F--k you.
GuB-42 5y ago
The problem with bloat today is not that developers have powerful computers. It is mostly that the latest trend is to ship software with their entire run time environment. Electron is the most glaring example, it essentially ships an entire browser with your app, which we may as well call an OS nowadays. So in the end, if you have 10 electron apps, you have 10 copies of Chrome in memory, in addition to your OS main browser. They are all the same except for a few minor differences. Sure, it solves "DLL hell" but at an extreme cost in efficiency.
- noahtallen 5y ago
  > It is mostly that the latest trend is to ship software with their entire run time environment. I think this is a side effect of the main trend, which is write once, run anywhere. There are a handful of frameworks aiming to do that, and it is difficult to accomplish and rely on native APIs. Also, I’d suggest it’s a trend for economic reasons rather than because people think electron is technically superior to native APIs. The economic reason is that even a medium/large company can just hire a sole developer or two to spin up an electron app that loads an existing web application and it works everywhere and is “good enough.” The alternative is hiring lots of people to build a native app that users only might think is better. I don’t think most electron examples are because people wanted a technically superior solution to native applications.
  - GuB-42 5y ago
    Writing apps for the browser is one thing, I don't particularly like it because it lacks the level of integration native apps have but for performance, it is not that bad. Browsers are well optimized and offer many interesting features out of the box. For me, the problem is that an Electron app ships with its own browser instead of using the one the system already has. Another example, mostly in the Linux world, is to use containers with their own subsystems instead of using system libraries. Snap, AppImage and Flatpak do that, especially Snap, which I think is the only one that doesn't support external dependencies. I understand the appeal, but that's really wasteful.
kaliszad 5y ago
For comparison, the whole OrgPad.com server currently uses 8 GB of RAM and 2 vCPUs. Everybody of the developers has 24 GB+ of RAM with all the main ones having 32 GB of RAM. This is because production uses "just" nginx, JVM with the application server, PostgreSQL, MinIO and a deduplicating backup using borg. The screenshot server is an extra VM, it runs headless Google Chrome with puppeteer on a 1 vCPU, 2 GB of RAM node. We developers use a desktop operating system and programs with a GUI. That by itself uses at least 1 GB of RAM extra. We have an IDE, like IntelliJ that uses about 3 GB of RAM on my machine, there are web browsers, known memory hogs. There are e-mail clients, video-chat apps and all of the production stuff besides backup too. Some of it is recompiling stuff live e.g. shadow-cljs. There is also Spotify or occasionally a video call or screen recording e.g. using OBS Studio. That uses even more memory temporarily. There is a healthy reserve with 32 GB of RAM to make the experience smooth but 16 GB doesn't cut it anymore. So we use about half of the amount of RAM eBay used on their Sun E10ks in 1999 just for development and that is ok. The RAM costs perhaps 100 € now. The 50 € difference really doesn't cut it, if I am having hangs because of swap and the GCs doing their best everywhere.
- nicce 5y ago
  But do you really need them all at the same time? Spotify and video call with screen recording at the same time? Screen recording and IDE at the same time? You can present your code without heavy IDEs if you are using screen recording for that. You can also replace Spotify with spotifyd for example, which takes 1/100 of the ram or less. I can also open all my apps at the same time and complain that there is no memory. It might be convenient to keep apps open on background, but you rarely need them at the same time. SSD:s are pretty fast in these days. Just open app when needed.
  - Kwpolska 5y ago
    > Screen recording and IDE at the same time? If I’m presenting some code, I’d prefer to do it in a familiar environment (i.e. my IDE of choice) — so that I don't get lost, so that I know the keyboard shortcuts, and don’t add more stress and fumbling to the presentation. Also, everyone on my team uses IntelliJ IDEA, so presenting with Code might add more confusion or might make it impossible to show IDEA-specific stuff (eg. run configurations or the debugger).
watersb 5y ago
Apple: "16GB is enough for reasonable people" Every professor at uni: "Ten days is plenty of time to complete this project."
peoplefromibiza 5y ago
> Software developers thinking that 16GB is a small amount of RAM is why all of our software is fat barges of bloat now no, that's not the reason. Anyway, it's 2021,16gb max for a new laptop in 2021 is factually low. Laptops had 16GB max more than 10 years ago. I think it's fair to criticize the specs of one of the most expensive pieces of hardware on the market if they are somewhat underwelming and when even new game consoles have the same amount of RAM, at a fraction of the price, with only one thing to do. edit: not comparing the performances or the energy efficiency here, but a Dell with a ryzen 5700 and 16gb of RAM (upgradable) costs € 829, an M1 with the same amount of RAM and less storage space costs € 1.659 on Apple website I think Apple could have done better in this regards
- MR4D 5y ago
  My car has the same horsepower (or luggage space, or windshield size, or more seats, etc.) as a Porsche. For some reason nobody here brings that up. Considering that AAPL is the most valuable company on the planet, they might just have a good understanding of their market. AAPL is serving their market well, and then make enough money each year to buy the entire Dell company. You may prefer Dell, and many people obviously do, but I don’t think AAPL needs to stuff 64Gb of Ram into everything.
  - peoplefromibiza 5y ago
    > My car has the same horsepower (or luggage space, or windshield size, or more seats, etc.) as a Porsche. We agree. Porsche and Apple base offers are overpriced, for what they actually offer. A 959 pearl white it's one thing, but a Macan? in this particular case the M1 is not comparable to a Porsche, but more to a luxury hotel that has a very tiny bathroom or a limit of one cup of coffee at breakfast. When you consciously spend the kind of money a Mac costs, you really expect the best the money can buy. > You may prefer Dell, and many people obviously do You got it backwards though. 16gb of maximum RAM for a laptop in 2021 doesn't even match the Dell offering... Imagine if the afore mentioned Porsche had a limiter that let you use only 50% of the accelerating power, unless you buy the more expensive "pro" model. That is basically the same car, only with the limiter removed. Anyway, nobody said anything on the ability Apple to make money, probably it says more on the people who buy macs than on Apple itself The article simply says that the best laptop in the market can't have 16gb of maximum available RAM. Which is true.
Gigachad 5y ago
I was really struggling to run all the stuff for web development on a 16gb dell xps. The database, text editor with plugins and browser all consumed too much. I don’t know why but I have even more running on my M1 MacBook and I have never bothered to check the ram and I don’t have my system crawling to a halt every day. I think some of this is very smart and fast swapping because I do sometimes notice a tiny hang when I use a window I haven’t touched in a while. I don’t know if the M1 is the best laptop, but it is the best I have used by a wide margin.
hulitu 5y ago
I hope you are aware that the world has evolved. We just don't run the compiler on bare metal anymore. Thanks to the latest UX, UI (GUI is obsolete), ML and AI advances the compiler runs in a web browser which runs in a VM, which runs in a container. And browsing the Slackware changelog is still a challenge on latest Edge /s

secondcoming 5y ago

16GB isn't a lot when developing, but that doesn't mean your final code should need 16GB to run. My old desktop has 32GB and my laptop has 128GB, both at their motherboard limits.

simonh 5y ago

The memory needed to efficiently compile an application isn’t the same as the memory needed to run it.

hulitu 5y ago
> The memory needed to efficiently compile an application isn’t the same as the memory needed to run it. This is becoming more and more false. See Firefox for example.
- simonh 5y ago
  You need 8GB of memory to efficiently compile Firefox, but you can run it in a lot less than that. Fundamentally when compiling the application you aren't running the application, you're running the compiler. They are different pieces of software with independent resource requirements. Even if they happen to be similar, that's really just a coincidence.

nikita2206 5y ago

It’s just not enough when it’s a multi-service backend that you want to run on your local machine, plus IDE, a browser, and a few well known electron/react native apps that play music and let you chat with your colleagues.

qeternity 5y ago
> and a few well known electron/react native apps that play music and let you chat with your colleagues. This is the whole point: devs with 32gb/64gb machines looking at their own app taking 1gb aren't going to realize that for many people this is 25% of the available non-os ram (8g system with 4g free non kernel / other.

scoopertrooper 5y ago

This is ridiculous nonsense written by, presumably, someone who isn't a professional software developer. Software developers often have to run several emulators (e.g. Docker Desktop, Android, and iOS emulators), hundreds of Chrome tabs, compilers, heavy 'ol IDEs, Microsoft freakin' Teams, and a bunch of other stuff concurrently. 16 GB is just enough for many workloads, but it's easy to see use cases in which would exceed that.

horns4lyfe 5y ago
Hundreds of chrome tabs? lol, ya, that’s on them.
darthrupert 5y ago
People should be literally at software houses' headquarters with pitchforks and torches, revolting against such wastes of resources.
- hulitu 5y ago
  It won't help. There seems to be a trend in SW development: if the program has an address space of 64 GB the programm shall use it. It does not matter that the program will not run alone on the system. Some years ago, when the first version of Crysis was released, it could not even run on the fastest computers available but it was celebrated as a real achievement. This is the spirit.
emodendroket 5y ago
I agree. But isn't part of the design conceit that the storage is fast enough that swapping isn't as painful as it would otherwise be?
rak1507 5y ago
This just proves the parent commenter right. 'Software developers often have to run...' - yes! That is the problem! People shouldn't have to run all of that, but they do. If people thought about what they really needed rather than just buying more hardware, the world would be a better place. (Also, I doubt you need hundreds of chrome tabs + heavy IDEs, a couple of tabs + <insert lightweight editor of choice> works just fine)

hdjjhhvvhga 5y ago

I understand why you're saying that but when you try do develop on Xcode running an emulator and at the same try to use your machine normally (keeping some tabs open, listening to some music etc.), suddenly 8 GB seems like very little. Moreover, when you develop for a platform like iOS, you have very limited control on how fat your application will be.

javchz 5y ago

A tradition for desktop software (mostly 3rd party) was to develop for "future hardware" from the moment you're developing, as Moore's law was a good rule of thumb to predict the future. But for reasons RAM and CPU performance have kept stagnated without a lot of changes for around 10 years (until recently with Ryzen 5000, Intel 12th, and Apple M1). Still I find funny you could buy a 16GB RAM Macbook 13" in 2012 as the top model... and today 16GB is still it's the max capacity of the line. To give a point of reference the 2002 Powerbook the Max RAM capacity was 1GB.

throw0101a 5y ago

> Software developers thinking that 16GB is a small amount of RAM […] It is… for development. Which is what software developers do and what they often buy hardware for. Whether it's too little for the apps that they develop to run on users' machines is a separate question.

yowlingcat 5y ago

I dunno man, are you sure about this kind of supply side thinking? I'm much more inclined to assume demand side causality here. Which is to say: software has become "fat barges of bloat" because the /consumers/ (not producers) of said software are okay with it.

renewiltord 5y ago

I’m not in the business of not using RAM. I’m in the business of making money. If you don’t want to use RAM, apply market pressure in that direction. The truth is, you have very little market power, so I genuinely don’t give a fuck. I’m not interested in selling a $1.99 product to a guy with a $199 device. I’m interested in selling a $199 product to a guy with a $3999 device. That’s the guy I’m going to listen to.

csdvrx 5y ago
> I’m not interested in selling a $1.99 product to a guy with a $199 device. I’m interested in selling a $199 product to a guy with a $3999 device. I love the way you're thinking (and presenting it) > That’s the guy I’m going to listen to. You and me both! Saving a few dollars on RAM is penny wise, pound foolish.
hulitu 5y ago
The problem is: you will be selling a $199 product to a guy with a $3999 device, but the product will be used on a $399 device because the guy who bought your product is not the same using it.

znpy 5y ago

> Software developers thinking Please restrict this to web developers. My decade old ThinkPad x200s with two Core2 Duo cores and 8gb of ram and an SSD can do most things very well, except browsing websites. Loading a large book in PDF format? no problem. Opening ten years of email in Claws Mail? sure thing. Opening the same amount of e-mail in thunderbird? A little sweaty, but why not? Playing mp3 files over bluetooth? Yeah! Wanna write a document in libreoffice writer? As long as you're a bit patient. Chat with other people using Telegram or Hexchat? No problem. ... What? You want to browse the web? F--k you.

GuB-42 5y ago

The problem with bloat today is not that developers have powerful computers. It is mostly that the latest trend is to ship software with their entire run time environment. Electron is the most glaring example, it essentially ships an entire browser with your app, which we may as well call an OS nowadays. So in the end, if you have 10 electron apps, you have 10 copies of Chrome in memory, in addition to your OS main browser. They are all the same except for a few minor differences. Sure, it solves "DLL hell" but at an extreme cost in efficiency.

noahtallen 5y ago
> It is mostly that the latest trend is to ship software with their entire run time environment. I think this is a side effect of the main trend, which is write once, run anywhere. There are a handful of frameworks aiming to do that, and it is difficult to accomplish and rely on native APIs. Also, I’d suggest it’s a trend for economic reasons rather than because people think electron is technically superior to native APIs. The economic reason is that even a medium/large company can just hire a sole developer or two to spin up an electron app that loads an existing web application and it works everywhere and is “good enough.” The alternative is hiring lots of people to build a native app that users only might think is better. I don’t think most electron examples are because people wanted a technically superior solution to native applications.
- GuB-42 5y ago
  Writing apps for the browser is one thing, I don't particularly like it because it lacks the level of integration native apps have but for performance, it is not that bad. Browsers are well optimized and offer many interesting features out of the box. For me, the problem is that an Electron app ships with its own browser instead of using the one the system already has. Another example, mostly in the Linux world, is to use containers with their own subsystems instead of using system libraries. Snap, AppImage and Flatpak do that, especially Snap, which I think is the only one that doesn't support external dependencies. I understand the appeal, but that's really wasteful.

kaliszad 5y ago

For comparison, the whole OrgPad.com server currently uses 8 GB of RAM and 2 vCPUs. Everybody of the developers has 24 GB+ of RAM with all the main ones having 32 GB of RAM. This is because production uses "just" nginx, JVM with the application server, PostgreSQL, MinIO and a deduplicating backup using borg. The screenshot server is an extra VM, it runs headless Google Chrome with puppeteer on a 1 vCPU, 2 GB of RAM node. We developers use a desktop operating system and programs with a GUI. That by itself uses at least 1 GB of RAM extra. We have an IDE, like IntelliJ that uses about 3 GB of RAM on my machine, there are web browsers, known memory hogs. There are e-mail clients, video-chat apps and all of the production stuff besides backup too. Some of it is recompiling stuff live e.g. shadow-cljs. There is also Spotify or occasionally a video call or screen recording e.g. using OBS Studio. That uses even more memory temporarily. There is a healthy reserve with 32 GB of RAM to make the experience smooth but 16 GB doesn't cut it anymore. So we use about half of the amount of RAM eBay used on their Sun E10ks in 1999 just for development and that is ok. The RAM costs perhaps 100 € now. The 50 € difference really doesn't cut it, if I am having hangs because of swap and the GCs doing their best everywhere.

nicce 5y ago
But do you really need them all at the same time? Spotify and video call with screen recording at the same time? Screen recording and IDE at the same time? You can present your code without heavy IDEs if you are using screen recording for that. You can also replace Spotify with spotifyd for example, which takes 1/100 of the ram or less. I can also open all my apps at the same time and complain that there is no memory. It might be convenient to keep apps open on background, but you rarely need them at the same time. SSD:s are pretty fast in these days. Just open app when needed.
- Kwpolska 5y ago
  > Screen recording and IDE at the same time? If I’m presenting some code, I’d prefer to do it in a familiar environment (i.e. my IDE of choice) — so that I don't get lost, so that I know the keyboard shortcuts, and don’t add more stress and fumbling to the presentation. Also, everyone on my team uses IntelliJ IDEA, so presenting with Code might add more confusion or might make it impossible to show IDEA-specific stuff (eg. run configurations or the debugger).

watersb 5y ago

Apple: "16GB is enough for reasonable people" Every professor at uni: "Ten days is plenty of time to complete this project."

peoplefromibiza 5y ago

> Software developers thinking that 16GB is a small amount of RAM is why all of our software is fat barges of bloat now no, that's not the reason. Anyway, it's 2021,16gb max for a new laptop in 2021 is factually low. Laptops had 16GB max more than 10 years ago. I think it's fair to criticize the specs of one of the most expensive pieces of hardware on the market if they are somewhat underwelming and when even new game consoles have the same amount of RAM, at a fraction of the price, with only one thing to do. edit: not comparing the performances or the energy efficiency here, but a Dell with a ryzen 5700 and 16gb of RAM (upgradable) costs € 829, an M1 with the same amount of RAM and less storage space costs € 1.659 on Apple website I think Apple could have done better in this regards

MR4D 5y ago
My car has the same horsepower (or luggage space, or windshield size, or more seats, etc.) as a Porsche. For some reason nobody here brings that up. Considering that AAPL is the most valuable company on the planet, they might just have a good understanding of their market. AAPL is serving their market well, and then make enough money each year to buy the entire Dell company. You may prefer Dell, and many people obviously do, but I don’t think AAPL needs to stuff 64Gb of Ram into everything.
- peoplefromibiza 5y ago
  > My car has the same horsepower (or luggage space, or windshield size, or more seats, etc.) as a Porsche. We agree. Porsche and Apple base offers are overpriced, for what they actually offer. A 959 pearl white it's one thing, but a Macan? in this particular case the M1 is not comparable to a Porsche, but more to a luxury hotel that has a very tiny bathroom or a limit of one cup of coffee at breakfast. When you consciously spend the kind of money a Mac costs, you really expect the best the money can buy. > You may prefer Dell, and many people obviously do You got it backwards though. 16gb of maximum RAM for a laptop in 2021 doesn't even match the Dell offering... Imagine if the afore mentioned Porsche had a limiter that let you use only 50% of the accelerating power, unless you buy the more expensive "pro" model. That is basically the same car, only with the limiter removed. Anyway, nobody said anything on the ability Apple to make money, probably it says more on the people who buy macs than on Apple itself The article simply says that the best laptop in the market can't have 16gb of maximum available RAM. Which is true.

Gigachad 5y ago

I was really struggling to run all the stuff for web development on a 16gb dell xps. The database, text editor with plugins and browser all consumed too much. I don’t know why but I have even more running on my M1 MacBook and I have never bothered to check the ram and I don’t have my system crawling to a halt every day. I think some of this is very smart and fast swapping because I do sometimes notice a tiny hang when I use a window I haven’t touched in a while. I don’t know if the M1 is the best laptop, but it is the best I have used by a wide margin.

hulitu 5y ago

I hope you are aware that the world has evolved. We just don't run the compiler on bare metal anymore. Thanks to the latest UX, UI (GUI is obsolete), ML and AI advances the compiler runs in a web browser which runs in a VM, which runs in a container. And browsing the Slackware changelog is still a challenge on latest Edge /s