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[–] RevanProdigalKnight 0 points 10 points (+10|-0) ago  (edited ago)

As a software engineer, one of the first things I was told in school was that there are always tradeoffs in programming. Want a program to run faster? Gotta use more RAM. Need to save space in memory? It's going to need to be on the disk, which increases waits for I/O operations.

In addition, most of the code running in a given program is part of a second- or third-party library, meaning the developer of the end product has no control over how it allocates its resources.

Now, is it impossible to work around these problems? No, not at all. We simply aren't given the time to do so by management.

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[–] tomlinas 0 points 2 points (+2|-0) ago 

Not only are there tradeoffs, but there's also a pretty unspoken tradeoff in a user-facing local application like Skype: you want the thing to be as responsive as possible to the user. If the user has 8GB of RAM and 5GB is free, I'm certainly not going to be focusing on keeping my memory footprint as small as possible.

With drive space and memory at all-time lows it's really not worth optimizing for those things anymore except in corner cases where you're crushing I/Ops with a database or running a really unoptimized set of threads or something.