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8GB RAM is not for coding!

Ben Naambo said:
thats is wrong i even code on a 4gb ram maschine and i dont expericned lags. nayve u missmanage ur ram using many uneessesary Google Chrome Tabs. Everyone knows Chrome loves overusing Ram
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That's true. I'm not sure what people are barking over here. You can code on 4GB hardware. You can easily use Godot, export your game to Android and if you have patience you can even use Unity and make a 2D game. Even 3D game. You can easily do web development on 4GB. I'm not sure why people are "laughing" at you. It's also perfect for making sure your software / game runs on older devices.
 
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iHorseHead said:
That's true. I'm not sure what people are barking over here. You can code on 4GB hardware. You can easily use Godot, export your game to Android and if you have patience you can even use Unity and make a 2D game. Even 3D game. You can easily do web development on 4GB. I'm not sure why people are "laughing" at you. It's also perfect for making sure your software / game runs on older devices.
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if in linux , should be okay. But in macos ,i dont think so unless you're totally pro user whom code in vi/nano . But in business , time is moneh. So most of us will be the fastest so we can compile and test faster.
 
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DaveFromCampbelltown said:
Honestly, sometimes I wonder what y'all 're bitchin' about.

I started my programming career writing, compiling and running a Fortran program on a 64 kbyte RAM(yes, that's 65,536 bytes, I counted each and every one of them) 8 bit CPU running at 4 MHz to simulate a live population of 30,000 fish.

You guys have never had it so easy...
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The complexity in the coding environments ... tools, languages, etc, etc ... confuse me. But then again I am easily confused. 1966 ... Fortran IV, GE-600 (635) mainframe, Dartmouth Time Sharing System (BASIC). I think the core (ferrite) memory was 32 KB. I fed my programs and data through a teletype machine via paper tape. The output returned via the teletype after a long wait ... maybe half an hour. No computer 'screens'.
 
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fontman said:
Just so you know if you're running any kind of current macOS Big Sur needs more than eight gigs of RAM to function properly. If you want to do any kind of meaningful work you need to have at least 32 gigs of RAM on a mackintosh with it is a huge OS and has huge overhead .
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Please stop this horse, I'm on a 2016 MBP with 8GB RAM and an i5 and Big Sur runs like butter even with a ton of apps open.
 
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The complexity in the coding environments ... tools, languages, etc, etc ... confuse me. But then again I am easily confused. 1966 ... Fortran IV, GE-600 (635) mainframe, Dartmouth Time Sharing System (BASIC). I think the total core (ferrite) memory was 32 KB shared by all the programmers. I fed my programs and data through a teletype machine via paper tape. The output returned via the teletype after a wait ... maybe half an hour. There were no computer 'screens'.
 
Because some people think they need free memory and become anxious when their RAM is actually put to good use, Apple invented Memory Pressure as a metric of how over or under used your memory actually is. At 30% you could easily cut your RAM in half and do the same work on a 4GB M1 Mac.
 
Gudi said:
Because some people think they need free memory and become anxious when their RAM is actually put to good use, Apple invented Memory Pressure as a metric of how over or under used your memory actually is. At 30% you could easily cut your RAM in half and do the same work on a 4GB M1 Mac.
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Ya the problem is while developing mine(and others') memory pressure is always in the yellow and frequently moves to red (at least for me) which means it's slowing down the computer and you can definitely feel it.
 
jake_the_tester said:
Maybe Hackintosh is still good option for now. Apple is getting more and more greedy...
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I don't want a hackintosh either, CBA to babysit broken kexts with each update. All I want is a device with 32 GB of Ram and M1/M2 and decent storage, like 1-2TB.
 
BP714 said:
...phpStorm, vsCode, Navicat Premium, Mongo Compass, Chrome and multiple shells and my M1 MacBook Air consistently outperforms my MacBook Pro! I can’t even believe how well it handles the load and how fast it is.
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I've got an 8GB MBP that's struggling a bit in PHPStorm. Did you you make any configuration tweaks to get it to work well for you? The maddening thing is that it actually does just fine for the most part. It's at least as fast as my 32GB 2018 MBP running power hungry debug tasks, but it stutters doing code completion and has short hiccups on truly rote tasks like just deleting a file.

I know people are going to jump on the 8GB part. Given that it does resource intensive stuff just fine and gets challenged by easier tasks, I'd think the memory isn't the issue. This isn't going to be my laptop for too long and I wanted to see if it would sink or swim on just the base memory.
 
BP714 said:
I have a 2020 M1 MacBook Air w/ 8GB and a 2019 Intel MacBook Pro w/ 32GB. I run 2 screens off my MBP and one off my MBA, both of which are 100% of the time running at a minimum phpStorm, vsCode, Navicat Premium, Mongo Compass, Chrome and multiple shells and my M1 MacBook Air consistently outperforms my MacBook Pro! I can’t even believe how well it handles the load and how fast it is.

p.s. IMHO people that use Wordpress aren’t real developers and at least the few I’ve had the unfortunate experience of knowing tend to not understand how any of the technology they use actually works, since none of them actually went to school for computer science but all of them think they’re engineers😂
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I also have the Air base model, I came from the 16" Pro base model and the Air performs much better and with less heat than the crappy 16" I had.

I couldn't hook up my 16" to an external monitor or all hell would break loose.

Personally I'm doing 7GB of swap every day during my 8-9h of work and thus far no issues what so ever. My biggest memory hogs are Microsoft Teams and HDB Studio.
 
iHorseHead said:
That's true. I'm not sure what people are barking over here. You can code on 4GB hardware. You can easily use Godot, export your game to Android and if you have patience you can even use Unity and make a 2D game. Even 3D game. You can easily do web development on 4GB. I'm not sure why people are "laughing" at you. It's also perfect for making sure your software / game runs on older devices.
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Just because you can doesn't mean you should. I do this for a living, and I need 4gb just to run the non-programming apps like Slack, Teams, JIRA, etc. Running a VM needs at least 8gb of RAM if you plan on using it for anything heavy.

Sure you can use 4gb, you could also type the code in assembly and stick to a computer with just 640kb of memory.
 
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thejadedmonkey said:
Just because you can doesn't mean you should. I do this for a living, and I need 4gb just to run the non-programming apps like Slack, Teams, JIRA, etc. Running a VM needs at least 8gb of RAM if you plan on using it for anything heavy.

Sure you can use 4gb, you could also type the code in assembly and stick to a computer with just 640kb of memory.
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Me also codes for living. Your point? I dont care what you use. I said it's enough for coding. Processor matters more. Also, I can code better and faster on my MSI laptop that has 8GB of RAM. It's not any worse than MBA.
MacBooks aren't for programming at all. I dont know any programmer or even an artist that use a Mac. It's only an American thing tbh.
 
iHorseHead said:
Me also codes for living. Your point? I dont care what you use. I said it's enough for coding. Processor matters more. Also, I can code better and faster on my MSI laptop that has 8GB of RAM. It's not any worse than MBA.
MacBooks aren't for programming at all. I dont know any programmer or even an artist that use a Mac. It's only an American thing tbh.
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And America’s been like not relevant for the last 100+ years lol.
 
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acorntoy said:
And America’s been like not releveant for the last 100+ years lol
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It's just I've never seen an artist or a programmer using a Mac in real life.
Everybody uses Windows PCs. I've worked for 2 gaming companies. 0 people used Apple devices for example. Even the artists didn't use Apple devices. My reality and what I read on the internet is very different. You can code on 8GB of RAM. You can make a great desktop app on 8GB of RAM or even a game.
There are even coders that only need 32k for coding (not kidding) and this thread is so generalising.
 
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iHorseHead said:
It's just I've never seen an artist or a programmer using a Mac in real life.
Everybody uses Windows PCs. I've worked for 2 gaming companies. 0 people used Apple devices for example. Even the artists didn't use Apple devices. My reality and what I read on the internet is very different. You can code on 8GB of RAM. You can make a great desktop app on 8GB of RAM or even a game.
There are even coders that only need 32k for coding (not kidding) and this thread is so generalising.
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I’ve seen the opposite. If you are on a windows your gonna struggle, but again it might just be a American thing 🤷‍♂️
 
iHorseHead said:
It's just I've never seen an artist or a programmer using a Mac in real life.
Everybody uses Windows PCs. I've worked for 2 gaming companies. 0 people used Apple devices for example. Even the artists didn't use Apple devices. My reality and what I read on the internet is very different. You can code on 8GB of RAM. You can make a great desktop app on 8GB of RAM or even a game.
There are even coders that only need 32k for coding (not kidding) and this thread is so generalising.
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Just go to any gathering event developer, for sure 90% is using macbook. I use long time acer laptop for development . 8GB is not enough for .net developer which mostly been taking by visual studio and mssql . 8 GB is still enough for php developer but not enough if u using phpstorm and open other program same times. For xcode development in macos, it's better 16 GB ram even thou i been 3 years using 8 GB till i upgrade it 16GB ram and the SSD.

I'm not sure what your gaming companies but i really sad for the developer .
 
alien3dx said:
Just go to any gathering event developer, for sure 90% is using macbook. I use long time acer laptop for development . 8GB is not enough for .net developer which mostly been taking by visual studio and mssql . 8 GB is still enough for php developer but not enough if u using phpstorm and open other program same times. For xcode development in macos, it's better 16 GB ram even thou i been 3 years using 8 GB till i upgrade it 16GB ram and the SSD.

I'm not sure what your gaming companies but i really sad for the developer .
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Mobile gaming as most gaming companies are nowadays.

I'm kind of struggling to understand what you wrote.
 
iHorseHead said:
Mobile gaming as most gaming companies are nowadays.

I'm kind of struggling to understand what you wrote.
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It depend on your company business , a bit weird if you don't understand a bit . Maybe you aren't functional business programmer.
 
acorntoy said:
I’ve seen the opposite. If you are on a windows your gonna struggle, but again it might just be a American thing 🤷‍♂️
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I'm not going to argue.
Also, Macs dont have a touch screen though as many PCs do nowadays, I don't really see why anyone would use Mac as a work computer.
 
Apple Knowledge Navigator said:
If you 'code' on a 4gb computer, then I can only assume you're not developing for modern hardware.

Either that, or you're a troll. I'm entertained by either one!
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Maybe troll maybe not , but i been in mac mini base 4 GB 2014. Dam awful slow . 4GB for linux box is good enough if only you want to type in nano/vi . :p
 
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