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This is ridiculous nonsense written by, presumably, someone who isn't a professional software developer. Software developers often have to run several emulator

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)
- scoopertrooper 5y ago
  I'm so glad there are people like you to tell me the best way to do my job without even knowing what I do - it must be a real skill. Yes, it would be possible to curate my tabs better, but I often have quite a few things on the boil at any one time and taking time out to carefully prune my tabs holds up delivery. I actually tried to subsist on a 8GB M1 for a few months, I managed to survive, but context switching became painfully slow as I'd have to shut down large parts of my tool chain and carefully prune off browser tabs. It was a serious productivity drain. It turns out that the heavy IDE is heavy for a reason, it provides useful capabilities! The kind of capabilities one needs as a professional software developer. When one is working on a foreign code base spanning thousands of files, it's genuinely handy to have some tooling to help you find your way around. VS Code tries, but it's generally pretty useless in my experience.
  - csdvrx 5y ago
    > I actually tried to subsist on a 8GB M1 for a few months, I managed to survive, but context switching became painfully slow as I'd have to shut down large parts of my tool chain and carefully prune off browser tabs. It was a serious productivity drain. A friend recommended I try such a RAM diet, so I went from 64Gb to a 4Gb laptop. Unlike you, I've found it helped me focus. So I've kept this laptop as a "productivity" laptop - when I work on a tight deadline, I use it, because there will be 0 risk of context switching :)
    - webmobdev 5y ago
      This is such a typical Apple fanboi type response - you are the one using it wrong.
      - csdvrx 5y ago
        Dude, I'm a Windows fangirl...
    - antifa 5y ago
      I think what you found helpful was the ability to pause a session, then return to it later. I think the ability to do this without buying a second laptop would be very useful.
nicce 5y ago
Or they just prefer easy and fast ways for developing apps (looking Electron et al.) Which bloats the memory. Goes unnoticed since they have high memory themselves. Literally Teams is one of them. Well, it is dropping Electron in the future.
belter 5y ago
While reading this and really doing nothing compared to a work day have: - 24 Chrome tabs open with news - 17 of Firefox - Waiting for VMWare Workstation to finish an install of the new Fedora 35 - Intellij is compiling a Rust program - Have Ableton live running in the background listening to a mix of last week - A presentation on PowerPoint for next week that looks like it would use half the resources of AWS us-west-1 - CLion while trying to see why a C++ example does not compile and Visual Studio Code to cleanup a Cloudformation template....
- atoav 5y ago
  If you run Ableton to listen to mixes, I encourage you to export/bounce the mixes and to listen to those instead. Offloads the CPU and has the benefit that you have it exported aomewhere in case old plugins vanish, chaos happens etc.
inopinatus 5y ago
None of that is necessary to develop software, and when you do want it, most of it doesn’t even have to run on your laptop. When did people become so helpless? I was offloading interactive workloads via X11 back in the 90s, and these days it’s to a near-instantly provisioned public cloud instance. If someone can’t get by in a pinch with vim and a command prompt, then I don’t particularly want them in my crew. There”s a corollary to that old dictum, “a bad worker blames their tools”, and it’s “a good worker chooses good tools”.
- scoopertrooper 5y ago
  If you don't want to give me a decent machine, I don't think I want to be on your crew. Anyway, I generally work for big corporates that don't give the developers the ability to spin up arbitrary cloud workloads from their laptops.
  - inopinatus 5y ago
    Oh, you’ll get a decent machine, but as the top comment conveys, developers that think this is a license to bloat need some firm correction, or simply weeding out. Not merely because their undisciplined code will be substantially more expensive to run, especially at scale, but also in particular because it’s correlated to being a useless towel in a crisis.
    - milkytron 5y ago
      > Oh, you’ll get a decent machine, but as the top comment conveys, developers that think this is a license to bloat need some firm correction, or simply weeding out. The thing is, I don't think a lot of businesses care about whether the software they create is bloated or not. Performance isn't valued as much as features or functionality. Teams for example makes repeated multi MB REST requests where websockets would probably be much more efficient. Until the business incentives are changed, I don't think we should expect much change (and maybe that does start with the developers).
  - Wellshit 5y ago
mamcx 5y ago
Also: You can't avoid a lot of it: Is PART OF THJE JOB. Also too: Next time people complain about JS, Java, Electron, etc? Remember this.
totalZero 5y ago
There's a miscommunication between your comment and GP. You may use 16GB RAM as a developer but that doesn't mean the average user of your product is equipped equivalently.
kaba0 5y ago
Mac has really good memory management though (and you can improve linux’s by a great margin if you don’t have too much RAM by enabling zram).
coldtea 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 That reality is part of the problem the parent wrote about...
Nginx487 5y ago
Not to talk about a bunch of virtual machines, especially if virtual machines is what you develop.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

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)

scoopertrooper 5y ago
I'm so glad there are people like you to tell me the best way to do my job without even knowing what I do - it must be a real skill. Yes, it would be possible to curate my tabs better, but I often have quite a few things on the boil at any one time and taking time out to carefully prune my tabs holds up delivery. I actually tried to subsist on a 8GB M1 for a few months, I managed to survive, but context switching became painfully slow as I'd have to shut down large parts of my tool chain and carefully prune off browser tabs. It was a serious productivity drain. It turns out that the heavy IDE is heavy for a reason, it provides useful capabilities! The kind of capabilities one needs as a professional software developer. When one is working on a foreign code base spanning thousands of files, it's genuinely handy to have some tooling to help you find your way around. VS Code tries, but it's generally pretty useless in my experience.
- csdvrx 5y ago
  > I actually tried to subsist on a 8GB M1 for a few months, I managed to survive, but context switching became painfully slow as I'd have to shut down large parts of my tool chain and carefully prune off browser tabs. It was a serious productivity drain. A friend recommended I try such a RAM diet, so I went from 64Gb to a 4Gb laptop. Unlike you, I've found it helped me focus. So I've kept this laptop as a "productivity" laptop - when I work on a tight deadline, I use it, because there will be 0 risk of context switching :)
  - webmobdev 5y ago
    This is such a typical Apple fanboi type response - you are the one using it wrong.
    - csdvrx 5y ago
      Dude, I'm a Windows fangirl...
  - antifa 5y ago
    I think what you found helpful was the ability to pause a session, then return to it later. I think the ability to do this without buying a second laptop would be very useful.

nicce 5y ago

Or they just prefer easy and fast ways for developing apps (looking Electron et al.) Which bloats the memory. Goes unnoticed since they have high memory themselves. Literally Teams is one of them. Well, it is dropping Electron in the future.

belter 5y ago

While reading this and really doing nothing compared to a work day have: - 24 Chrome tabs open with news - 17 of Firefox - Waiting for VMWare Workstation to finish an install of the new Fedora 35 - Intellij is compiling a Rust program - Have Ableton live running in the background listening to a mix of last week - A presentation on PowerPoint for next week that looks like it would use half the resources of AWS us-west-1 - CLion while trying to see why a C++ example does not compile and Visual Studio Code to cleanup a Cloudformation template....

atoav 5y ago
If you run Ableton to listen to mixes, I encourage you to export/bounce the mixes and to listen to those instead. Offloads the CPU and has the benefit that you have it exported aomewhere in case old plugins vanish, chaos happens etc.

inopinatus 5y ago

None of that is necessary to develop software, and when you do want it, most of it doesn’t even have to run on your laptop. When did people become so helpless? I was offloading interactive workloads via X11 back in the 90s, and these days it’s to a near-instantly provisioned public cloud instance. If someone can’t get by in a pinch with vim and a command prompt, then I don’t particularly want them in my crew. There”s a corollary to that old dictum, “a bad worker blames their tools”, and it’s “a good worker chooses good tools”.

scoopertrooper 5y ago
If you don't want to give me a decent machine, I don't think I want to be on your crew. Anyway, I generally work for big corporates that don't give the developers the ability to spin up arbitrary cloud workloads from their laptops.
- inopinatus 5y ago
  Oh, you’ll get a decent machine, but as the top comment conveys, developers that think this is a license to bloat need some firm correction, or simply weeding out. Not merely because their undisciplined code will be substantially more expensive to run, especially at scale, but also in particular because it’s correlated to being a useless towel in a crisis.
  - milkytron 5y ago
    > Oh, you’ll get a decent machine, but as the top comment conveys, developers that think this is a license to bloat need some firm correction, or simply weeding out. The thing is, I don't think a lot of businesses care about whether the software they create is bloated or not. Performance isn't valued as much as features or functionality. Teams for example makes repeated multi MB REST requests where websockets would probably be much more efficient. Until the business incentives are changed, I don't think we should expect much change (and maybe that does start with the developers).
- Wellshit 5y ago

mamcx 5y ago

Also: You can't avoid a lot of it: Is PART OF THJE JOB. Also too: Next time people complain about JS, Java, Electron, etc? Remember this.

totalZero 5y ago

There's a miscommunication between your comment and GP. You may use 16GB RAM as a developer but that doesn't mean the average user of your product is equipped equivalently.

kaba0 5y ago

Mac has really good memory management though (and you can improve linux’s by a great margin if you don’t have too much RAM by enabling zram).

coldtea 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 That reality is part of the problem the parent wrote about...

Nginx487 5y ago

Not to talk about a bunch of virtual machines, especially if virtual machines is what you develop.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]