Comment by Mawr

> If there is ample memory available, why waste energy on that?

Cute argument, but there's no way for a program to know how much memory is available. And there is such a thing as "appropriate amount of memory for this task". Hint: "4GB+" / "unbounded" is not the right answer for an LSP on a <10k line project.

> Nonetheless, it's absolutely trivial to set a single parameter to limit memory usage and Java's GCs being absolute beasts, they will have no problem operating more often.

Cool, then the issues I mentioned should never have existed in the first place. But they did, and probably still do today, I can't test easily. So clearly, they're not so easy to fix for some reason.

Also, this is such programmer-speak. It's trivial to set a single parameter? Absolutely, you just need to know that's what's needed, what the parameter is, how to set it, and what to set it to. Trivial! And how exactly would I, as a user, know any of this?

I'm a decent example here, since I could tell the software is written in Java (guess how), I know about its GC tuning parameters and I could probably figure out what parameters to set. So what exact value should I set? 500MB? 1GB? 2GB? How long should I spend doing trial-and-error?

Now consider you'd be burdening every single user of the program with the above. How about we, as engineers, choose the right program parameters, so that the user doesn't have to do or worry about anything? How about that.

> a classic space vs time tradeoff again

Most of the time, just like here, "it's a tradeoff" is a weasel phrase used to excuse poor engineering. Everything is a tradeoff, so pointing that out says nothing. Tradeoffs have to be chosen wisely too, you know.