alt Hacker Newsbtw, is it me or is there any justification for anyone including a developer to run more than 8GB of RAM for a laptop? I don't see functionality as having changed in the last 15 years.
For me, only Rust compilation necessitates more RAM. But, I assume devs just do RAM heavy dev work on a server over ssh.
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You asked if there is a justification and then in the same post justified why you need it.
Browser + 2 vscode + 4 docker container + MS Teams + postman + MongoDB Compass
Sure it is bloated, but it is the stack we have for local development
Browsers can get quite bloated, especially if one is not in the habit of closing tabs or restarting it from time to time. IDEs, other development tools, and most Electron abominations are also not shy about guzzling memory.
Chrome on my work laptop sits around 20-30GB all day every day.
With 32 GB I can run two whole Electron applications! Discord and Slack!
It's a life of luxury, I tell you.
There's all the usual "$APPLICATION is a memory hog" complaints, for one.
In the SWE world, dev servers are a luxury that you don't get in most companies, and most people use their laptops as workstations. Depending on your workflow, you might well have a bunch of VMs/containers running.
Even outside of SWE world, people have plenty of use for more than 8GiB of RAM. Large Photoshop documents with loads of layers, a DAW with a bazillion plugins and samples, anything involving 4k video are all workloads that would struggle running on such a small RAM allowance.