Why not a box with 128MB of RAM then?

> If I give you a box with 1 GiB of RAM, you are literally forced to either optimize your code to run in it, or accept the slowdown from paging. How is this specious?

It is specious reasoning. Self-imposing arbitrary constraints don't make you write good, performant code. At most it makes your apps run slower because they will needlessly hit your self-impose arbitrary constraints.

If you put any value on performant code you just write performance-oriented code, regardless of your constraints. It's silly to pile on absurd constraints and expect performance to be an outcome. It's like going to the gym and work out with a hand tied behind your back, and expect this silly constraints to somehow improve the outcome of your workout. Complete nonsense.

And to drive the point home, this whole concern is even more perplexing as you are somehow targeting computational resources that fall below free tiers of some cloud providers. Sheer lunacy.