I don’t know how many times I’ve heard or read that while developing software, memory footprint considerations are no longer important. RAM is cheap, default configurations have plenty, software development resources are expensive in comparison, so go ahead, throw that library in the link, instantiate those STL templates!
And here I am on a 2.4GHz P4 with a half-Gig of RAM, wondering why the heck I’m swapping so much, and feeling like my system is weighted down, groaning under the pressure. Sure, blame it on WinXP’s swapping tendencies, but at least some of the blame is on these huge footprint programs, my Blackberry IDE wants 110MB, iTunes wants 25. Gallery Remote wants 20, as does any Swing-based Java app, Acrobat Reader needs 32. Even my AOL/IM client wants to open an Ad now and then that launches a JVM.
So, like a breath of fresh air, I fire up Miranda, and note that it sits in the background very nicely waiting for IM’s, occupying only a couple Meg of VM space. Gripe, gripe… I suppose I betray my age and duration in this industry.
You know, young whippersnapper, when I was your age I only had 16KB of RAM to work with, and that was a luxury!