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Comment by Grombobulous

18 hours ago

I’m not appalled by it because the resource use is “free.”

I already have 32GB of RAM plus an M2 Max in my laptop because my company issued it to me. I already have 32GB of RAM and a 9850X3D in my desktop because I play games.

What non-ideological motivation do I have to ration computing resources on my IDE? Even if I had an 8GB MacBook Neo, VSCode would run fine.

If I was coding on a raspberry pi my story would change (although I suspect VSCode would run fine on that, too), but I’m not so I don’t care. It’s fast enough to get the job done and the rich featureset is more important than raw performance.

>What non-ideological motivation do I have to ration computing resources on my IDE?

I feel gross explaining this.

If we both have the same exact machine, but I choose to use software that uses substantially less resources -- well -- then I get to run more of that software simultaneously.

if you use computers as some big single-tasked typewriter equivalent then yeah, who cares.

it's not all fucking style and ideology, sometimes behaviors have a decent concrete reasoning.