Apart from VM usage ( Which i have no idea if this could be minimized ), May be we should ask the Apps developers, and even Apple is guilty in this, Why their Apps are using GB of memory? Why is Slack using 3GB? iTunes 1.2GB? OSX consuming 4GB.

The abundance of memory and CPU has let developers create monster apps that doesn't take performance or resources in mind.

I have 8GB on my laptop and never managed to use more than around 5 GB.

Using Visual Studio, Android Studio, Netbeans.

VS is 32-bit so it will never use more than 3.5GB. However that limitation is super annoying when you have > 3GB in symbols trying to load.

VS was just one example on my list.

Hey I'm with you. I would love for VS to use more RAM so it would stop crashing due to running out of address space all the time.

Is your point that claims of memory need are exaggerated, or that everyone else is doing it wrong?

Chrome alone can take up 5GB. Right now DataGrip and RubyMine are on my machine are taking up 4GB, and even iTunes is taking up 1GB for some inexplicable reason.

Then I fired up a Windows 10 VM. 4GB by itself.

That most people are doing it wrong.

I configure my set of actual running programs for the work being done on that specific moment, not for the work being done during the week.

For example, I only open multiple browser tabs when searching for documentation, and even there I barely go over 10. Which I anyway close, after I am done with it.

Each application is only running for the time it is actually needed and does provide value to my workflow, otherwise it just a waste of CPU, memory and screen estate.

Try running a VM and compiling inside that...

The nature of VMs is that you can assign memory to it. So if your machine is already light, you wouldn't give it much memory to start with, and it'd run (just slower)

So you're saying the Mac "Pro" is OK for running things slowly.

Not saying that at all. Saying that if someone says it'll run in 8GB instead of 16GB, or 16 instead of 32, it's possible, but those claims ignore performance. The presence of those statements means absolutely nothing absent of context (for instance, the required performance of a Windows 10 VM isn't the same for someone just testing a site on IE versus a developer running a 300GB SQL Server database)

You mean like using Swift, D and Rust on a VMWare instance running Ubuntu Linux 16.04 LTS?

Linking some amount of C++ code can get very painful very quickly on a constrained VM.

Linking C++ is painful anywhere, this from the point of view of someone that likes the language since 1993.

Modules might finally solve it, but it will a Python3 like story until they get integrated across major compilers, libraries and frameworks.

I run 2-5 instances of Visual Studio and each one takes up 1-2 GB

Why on earth do you need so many open?!

You can only have one solution open at a time. For example you may be working on a complex DLL (composed of multiple sub-projects compiling to static libs) as one solution. You may also want to have the solution for a consuming application open so you can test changes there as well.

Yes, but that usually means 2, not up to 5.

I don't use the visual studio IDE for my work (just msbuild from the command line) but if I did it would be more than 5 solutions that I use daily. In rare cases I need to enlist in even more projects. I'm not the original OP but I can certainly emphasize with his problem.

That said my work gets done on a Xeon workstation not a laptop, so in that respect we are different.