this post was submitted on 26 Dec 2025
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I mean, don't get me wrong, I also find startup time important, particularly with CLIs. But high memory usage slows down your application in other ways, too (not just other applications on the system). You will have more L1, L2 etc. cache misses. And the OS is more likely to page/swap out more of your memory onto the hard drive.
Of course, I don't either sit in front of an application and can tell that it was a non-local NUMA memory access that caused a particular slowness, so I can understand not really being able to care for iterative improvements. But yeah, that is also why I quite like using an efficient stack outright. It just makes computers feel as fast as they should be, without me having to worry about it.
Side-note
I heavily considered ending this comment with this dumbass meme:Then I realized, I'm responding to someone called "Caveman". Might've been subconscious influence there. ๐
I should learn C because of Unga Bunga reasons. I fully agree that lower RAM usage is better and cache misses are absolute performance killers but at the company I'm at there's just no time or people or scale to do anything remotely close to that. We just lazy load and allow things to slowly cost more RAM while keeping the experience nice.
I mean, for me, it's also mostly a matter of us doing embedded(-adjacent) software dev. So far, my company would hardly ever choose one stack over another for performance/efficiency reasons. But yeah, maybe that is going to change in the future.