Howard Chu (hyc.delete@this.symas.com) on February 27, 2019 7:45 am wrote:
> Jukka Larja (roskakori2006.delete@this.gmail.com) on February 27, 2019 7:11 am wrote:
> > Howard Chu (hyc.delete@this.symas.com) on February 27, 2019 6:21 am wrote:
> >
> > > Note - 2GB is actually plenty to be productive in C. It's not enough
> > > for parallel compiles of C++ unfortunately. IMO this is the fault of C++,
> > > not of the ARM boxes.
> >
> > Unfortunately 2 GB isn't enough for the browser I need to run
> > to be able to write anything non-trivial with any language.
> >
> > (Not that I would be in the market for an ARM box even if they were a bit faster than
> > x86 ones. However, I find it absurd that 2 GBs is considered "plenty" for any use.)
>
> I find it absurd that anyone needs to run a browser just to write code.
> I do all my coding in vi (vim actually). It should worry you if you need
> to load up a multi-GB environment just to edit a couple-KB source file.

I find it amazing that some people can seemingly work with vi or vim and get things done. I'm OK with GUI text editor, but even though such things didn't exists when I started to program (for fun. I've only done it for work since 2009), they are about as low as I can go. On Nano or Emacs my productivity is hampered. On vi or vim I need to google things like how to save or quit, even though I've googled them dozen times already. I can't comprehend how people remember more than few shortcut commands, no matter what software they use.

People are different, but as far as I can see, I'm much more common example of a programmer than the few vim users. I did do some assembler programming in early 90s using Q editor, downloaded docs and a book. It was fun and I got things done, but looking back to that, I got very little done with huge effort. I don't think I would have become a programmer at all in that world.

> Fwiw, an 8-core Cortex-A53 like RK3368 or S912 running parallel make can
> build fairly large C projects quite easily.

After several man-months worth of work, our (C++) codebase now compiles and links (for most common configuration) on i7-7900X in about two minutes. If we could cheaply (or at all) drop that by 50 %, it would be noticeable improvement in productivity.

Still, if it would take 10 minutes on some hardware, it could still be said to "build fairly large C++ projects quite easily". That was how things were on before cheap 6+ core CPUs with high single-threaded performance, and our optimizations. However, considering what my employer pays me, it would make no sense at all to tolerate that today.

-JLarja