And detractors of Emacs used to claim that it stood for "Eight Megabytes And Constant Swapping" meaning that even on a then-huge machine with eight megabytes of RAM Emacs would use up all the memory. Now it is a tiny program compared to things like Visual Studio Code.

one of the more interesting things to think about is the big push to rendering all window manager stuff through a gpu, because we were sure we needed drop shadows and geometry transforms for windows....

Now, what we actually do in a window manager could easily be done in software in realtime, just farmed out to some cpu core.