3 ms·
Ask HN: Why DrRacket is so much memory hungrier than “bloated” Visual Studio?
Racket editor (DrRacket) is incredibly memory hungry. Indeed, try this: 1) Launch DrRacket 2) Launch Microsoft Visual Studio 3) Start Task Manager and look at memory consumption.
You will get the result as in this picture: https://ibb.co/ZLdTPGB
You’ll see that DrRacket consumes an enormous 648MB of memory while you haven’t even done anything in it yet! Visual studio consumes only 240MB (which is still a lot, to be clear, but still significantly less than the pathetic DrRacket).
Why is this so???
Is this the best argument that the whole Racket thing is failed project, maybe?
(Especially, given that the performance was even worse before, but the core team decided to switch to excellent Chez Scheme recently, being unable to produce decent compiler by themselves.)
It is especially interesting that the Racket community always says that they are superior, but they are obviously not able to make a more memory efficient editor than, according to them, the poor Visual Studio (which is much more than an editor and has many more functions than DrRacket)!
- michaelmrose 4y agoDrRacket is a tool designed to provide an excellent experience specifically for learning and using racket. It isn't a failed attempt at being visual studio any more than a motorcycle is a car where they forgot two of the wheels. You focus on a 400MB difference in RAM as if it was meaningful somehow when 16GB costs $50 then you somehow smear them for building on Chez Scheme as if that was a sign of weakness despite working well for many years without it but lost in a substantial amount of poorly considered noise is a better question. If you hate racket so much why would you be concerned about DrRacket an environment whose utility is entirely working with the language you so despise? Additional thoughts: - Using additional punctuation as an intensifier isn't effective in what is supposed to be professional communication. - Nobody wants to click a link for information you provided inline in the text. - Paragraphs ought to be more than 4 words no matter how much punctuation you add after. > Is this the best argument that the whole Racket thing is failed project, maybe? Posts should have some thesis. This appears bad as it is to be the thesis of the post. Move it to the front and remove the question mark. Either it is or it isn't. - Consider following the thesis with some actual support. The world and especially the internet isn't a chorus of sympathetic ears. If you make a strong statement like the work of dozens of people is a "failed" effort and don't support it people are apt to assume your talking out of your ass.
- dytyramb 4y agoOf course it's meaningful. The racket community constantly emphasizes `the quality` of the Racketm but in reality they are not able to produce anything that would consume less than 0.5 Gb! Even Microsoft somehow manages to do that (with much more features than DrRacket ever had). Acording to Racket community, Racket should be better than a `typical Microsoft product`, but dont even come close.
- orbz 4y agoYou’re missing one of the fundamental parts of engineering here: trade offs. Perhaps first start memory consumption hasn’t been a priority yet. Maybe the system pre-allocates memory to speed up later tasks and VS will have a larger memory footprint under normal working loads. In any case, it does not appear that you have critically analyzed the situation and your post comes off as needlessly divisive.
- gus_massa 4y ago> Maybe the system pre-allocates memory to speed up later tasks I don't think so. But part of the problem is that DrRacket includes the equivalent of the compiler and linker and perhaps also the standard library of C# or whatever you are using in VS. I don't think that explains all the difference, because Racket use untyped variables and lot of lambdas for "callbacks" and other functional tuff. Another problem is that macros make syntax highlighting and other stuff more complicated. Some people (like me) think these features make programing easier. Try Racket until you don't see the parens, and make your own opinion. (Anyway, I suggest to disable the extensions of DrRacket that you are not using. That decreases the loading time a lot.)
- dytyramb 4y agoThe bottom line is: 1) DrRacket consumes 0.7 GB od RAM for very little functionality, in comparison to Visual Studio 2) The performace was even worse but than Racket core team switched to excelent Chez scheme, being unable to produce such a quality compiler 3) If by any chance DrRacket was written in C, it would consume 300Kb of max memory, considering how little functionality this `development environment` has 4) I admire Kent Dybvig, I adore Marc Feeley, I love Mark Tarver. They all did really great things. But this team of the Racket really deserves more contempt than admiration (for details see this link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_wY7FBtr7_c https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_wY7FBtr7_c)