Ask HN: Ultrabook for programming?

Re:Ask HN: Ultrabook for programming? by jagtesh on Friday January 20, 2017 @08:01AM (#13443461)

If you are a power multi-tasker (20+ browser tabs at any given time) running IntelliJ with a couple of electron apps (Slack, Spotify), it will slow down your system with constant disk-thrashing on a 8 GB machine even with an SSD. I use a Macbook Pro 2015 (8GB RAM/128 GB SSD) and I cannot run a fully featured IDE anymore. No more WebStorm or RubyMine. Vim is the only way to go!

You're a little bit in luck as Windows machines are considerably cheaper. Go for at least an i5/16GB/256GB SSD.

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Re:Ask HN: Ultrabook for programming? by BoorishBears on Friday January 20, 2017 @08:17AM (#13443546)

> I use a Macbook Pro 2015 (8GB RAM/128 GB SSD) and I cannot run a fully featured IDE anymore. No more WebStorm or RubyMine. Vim is the only way to go!

I use an identical i5 model with Android Studio (think IntelliJ with more resource usage), an Android emulator/VM, a Gradle daemon taking up 2-3GBs for builds, Safari with umpteen tabs, Slack, Outlook and Spotify open and don't have issues with disk thrashing (or at least, none I can tell based on usage and the Activity Monitor memory pressure).

I don't know how you're forced to use Vim.

I've noticed that OSX will do what I'd like any modern OS to do and use the majority of my ram with a few things running things running. But adding more of a workload when it's using nearly 8GB doesn't instantly make it "run out of memory", more paging occurs but not nearly enough to cause disk thrashing (or be easily perceptible)

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Re:Ask HN: Ultrabook for programming? by jagtesh on Saturday January 21, 2017 @07:29PM (#13452895)

I'm not forced, I quite like working on Vim. However I develop on a multi-app setup, 3 backend services and 4 npm based frontend apps with watchers and works running in background. RubyMine/Webstorm has a hard time keeping up and the memory usage shoots up to several gigabytes. As for Slack, I counted just now - the compressed memory usage is ~750MB! These things seem insignificant but do add up, especially with Chrome which itself takes a few gigabytes.

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Re:Ask HN: Ultrabook for programming? by dagw on Friday January 20, 2017 @08:19AM (#13443567)

I use a Macbook Pro 2015 (8GB RAM/128 GB SSD) and I cannot run a fully featured IDE anymore.

I use a 2010 MBA with 4GB of RAM and run WebStorm or PyCharm just fine.

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Re:Ask HN: Ultrabook for programming? by wildrhythms on Friday January 20, 2017 @08:52AM (#13443743)

To contrast, I'm on a 4+ yr old MBA with 8GB RAM and the 120GB SSD and I run IntelliJ IDEA, Safari with dozens of tabs, iTunes, and usually one other text editor (VS Code or ST3) without any compromises.

I'm not sure what's happening with your system, but maybe it's not happening properly.

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Re:Ask HN: Ultrabook for programming? by drKarl on Friday January 20, 2017 @08:04AM (#13443477)

I use Vim on the command line, but for Java programming I also like to use the features of an IDE like IntelliJ (or at least Eclipse). I always use Vim plugins for those (Vrapper for Eclipse or Idea-Vim for Idea).

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Re:Ask HN: Ultrabook for programming? by phaas on Saturday January 21, 2017 @08:36AM (#13449973)

It's worth checking that the laptop actually works as per spec.

I just replaced a Mid-2012 MBP's hard drive cable. It hadn't failed outright, but the system would take a very long time to read/write anything from the drive, constantly freezing apps.

Once I installed a new cable ($12 off amazon), it's speedy again.

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Re:Ask HN: Ultrabook for programming? by gcp on Friday January 20, 2017 @08:53AM (#13443750)

20+ browser tabs at any given time

Are you browsing with Chrome?

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Re:Ask HN: Ultrabook for programming? by jagtesh on Saturday January 21, 2017 @07:18PM (#13452863)

Yep, I use Chrome mainly because I like the developer tools on Chrome better.

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