About the RAM problem
In the age of Desktop JavaScript and bloated messaging clients I've had to endure a conversation that goes like this many times:
"Program XYZ is a freaking hog"
"How so?"
"It eats almost 1 Gigabyte of RAM and is slow."
"I cannot comment on the slowness, but why would 1 Gigabyte of RAM be a problem when you have 16 GB?"
And still, I cannot wrap my head around the stupidity of the statement from above.
Yes, I am sure most of use have 16 GB of RAM in our desktops and possibly more.
Yes, I agree that unused RAM is wasted RAM.
But we live in the age of multitasking operating systems. Applications, especially messaging ones run in the background. They are not supposed to take priority over, for example, my development environment. They are not supposed to increase the compiler time of my applications by twice the amount.
The question is not whether or 1 Gigabyte of RAM being used in total is a problem. It is a single application that takes a big chunk away that other programs could take advantage of.
...and also, keep in mind that we live in the age of portables. Most people prefer to not have huge, clunky desktops with lots of wires sticking out. Laptops exists, too. The average high end laptop only comes with 8 GB of RAM!
This means running some bloated application like Slack, will eat 1/8 of the total available memory. Don't forget that your OS needs RAM too... and the web-browser, the development environment, the applications themselves.
You'd be running out of RAM quickly.
So can we please start admitting that your lazy webapp ports suck because you're too comfortable to write a native application that will also take advantage of the hosts systems Accessibility framework?
Yeah, screw you too for fucking over people with disabilities, but of course you had to write your own interface framework so you could post it on HackerNews.
--Marco