4 ms·

AITA for pointing out that we've pushed the "barbarian practice of memory management" to the user?

• samus 3y ago
  Depends who you ask. I personally rarely noticed memory management overhead when using Emacs. If it indeed behaves janky, then the ancient defaults are to blame. Automated memory management is very difficult in the general case, but the strategy from TA sounds very reasonable and sane on modern machines: UIs typically have infrequent peaks of high activity and long breaks in between. Would be interesting to see how many users are actually using it on computers made in the last century, where the default strategy might be more appropriate.
  • GMoromisato 3y ago
    Yeah, I was trying to be funny. But it’s still interesting to me that this thread is filled with users talking about their techniques for forcing a GC while they’re getting coffee or switching tabs. The fact that in 2024 we’re talking about users (expert users, to be fair) changing setting in their apps to optimize GC pauses makes me think something has gone wrong somewhere. But maybe I’m just being mean because I mostly use C++. Goes to show that it’s trade-offs all the way down.
    • samus 3y ago
      Yes, it is appreciated :-) As I said, Emacs has many ancient defaults that many people have to fiddle with to make the editor theirs. Some of them is because of a slow drift of user preferences over the generations. But memory management strategy is one area where objectively a new default strategy would make a lot of sense. One which automatically adapts to RAM size, since Emacs scales down so well, unlike its competing memory guzzlers.
• Am4TIfIsER0ppos 3y ago
  No. Assholes would remove the ability to tweak a program.