On Monday, 22 September 2014 at 13:23:33 UTC, simendsjo wrote:
My guess is the average for developers is ~8GB. 2GB RAM is
really not
enough for pretty much anything these days - the browser alone
easily
chews 3-4GB on moderate use.
You have to admit that this is ridiculous. I updated to the
64-bit Chrome on Windows when it came out and it is a huge memory
hog. Web browsers have grown out of control.
On Monday, 22 September 2014 at 18:59:13 UTC, Vladimir Panteleev
wrote:
Firefox requires 4GB of memory to build.
Chromium requires 8GB of memory to build.
This is not a requirement for Chromium, merely a recommendation
for faster builds. I regularly built Chromium for FreeBSD with 2
GBs of RAM up till a couple years ago. Perhaps it has gotten
much more bloated since or maybe just on Windows, but phobos
shouldn't be in the same class.
If you want to work on big projects, you WILL need a decent
computer.
I think 4GB for a modern programming language's implementation
is not an unreasonable requirement, even if it could be brought
down in the future. Especially considering that you can't even
buy a new laptop today with less than 4GB of RAM, and 3GB is
becoming the norm for smartphones.
I'd say it's unreasonable from a technical standpoint, maybe not
that much from an affordability standpoint, which is what you're
pointing out. My guess is the real problem is optlink on
Windows, in which case I recommend that Nick try out the new
32-bit MSVC toolchain support, if he can't use the existing
64-bit Windows MSVC integration.
I regularly build git HEAD of dmd/druntime/phobos in a linux VM
with 512 MB of RAM and about the same amount of swap and have
never had a problem. It's only when compiling the unit tests
that I have to start increasing the allocated RAM.
