this post was submitted on 26 Dec 2025
362 points (98.1% liked)
Programming
24083 readers
797 users here now
Welcome to the main community in programming.dev! Feel free to post anything relating to programming here!
Cross posting is strongly encouraged in the instance. If you feel your post or another person's post makes sense in another community cross post into it.
Hope you enjoy the instance!
Rules
Rules
- Follow the programming.dev instance rules
- Keep content related to programming in some way
- If you're posting long videos try to add in some form of tldr for those who don't want to watch videos
Wormhole
Follow the wormhole through a path of communities !webdev@programming.dev
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
As a programmer myself I don't care about RAM usage, just startup time. If it takes 10s to load 150MB into memory it's a good case for putting in the work to reduce the RAM bloat.
I mean, don't get me wrong, I also find startup time important, particularly with CLIs. But high memory usage slows down your application in other ways, too (not just other applications on the system). You will have more L1, L2 etc. cache misses. And the OS is more likely to page/swap out more of your memory onto the hard drive.
Of course, I don't either sit in front of an application and can tell that it was a non-local NUMA memory access that caused a particular slowness, so I can understand not really being able to care for iterative improvements. But yeah, that is also why I quite like using an efficient stack outright. It just makes computers feel as fast as they should be, without me having to worry about it.
Side-note
I heavily considered ending this comment with this dumbass meme:Then I realized, I'm responding to someone called "Caveman". Might've been subconscious influence there. π
I should learn C because of Unga Bunga reasons. I fully agree that lower RAM usage is better and cache misses are absolute performance killers but at the company I'm at there's just no time or people or scale to do anything remotely close to that. We just lazy load and allow things to slowly cost more RAM while keeping the experience nice.
I mean, for me, it's also mostly a matter of us doing embedded(-adjacent) software dev. So far, my company would hardly ever choose one stack over another for performance/efficiency reasons. But yeah, maybe that is going to change in the future.
But you repeat yourself.
Not sure why you said that. In programming I lean DRY unless it's a separate use case. The repetitions come from the hundreds of left pad implementations in node_modules