An editor that needs (even) 2GB to be blindingly fast is a failure.

It's not the editor part that uses all this RAM I suppose, but the code parser and indexer that by default includes scanning & interpreting all your dependencies (system headers, boost, other third-party frameworks). There is a clang process that has the full AST for all of your code + its dependencies in the background all the time, so you can get search, index, autocomplete, syntax check, refactor etc. that actually works compared to the half-baked solutions you get with VIM plugins (and I've tried all of them).

I guess you can switch all of that off of course, but that's what makes it an IDE and not an editor. I think the memory tradeoff is perfectly fine for this kind of application.

At the moment I am sitting here adding couple of things to a huge desktop application written in Delphi. More then a million lines for a full build (which takes 11 seconds on laptop btw). It does all that you mention with all bells and whistles of a modern IDE and consuming whopping 380MB. How's that for a change?

Apples and oranges, Delphi != C++, and on top of that I don't think you really want to make the argument that the Delphi IDE can do all the things CLion can do for C++. I fondly remember my time writing Delphi, but I'm not jaded enough about the resource requirements of modern IDE's to pretend that you can compare these environments equally.

Anyway, I don't really see the point you trying to argue here. It appears you are principally opposed to software that uses more resources than what you consider necessary, which is fine and in the case of something like CLion or VS code justified to some extent, because they are far from lightweight. But if you remove these ideological objections from the discussion, none of this actually matters all that much considering typical workstation hardware. I honestly don't mind trading 4 or 8 of the 16 GB of RAM in my laptop for all the features I get from CLion compared to the alternatives. A full compile and run of the thing I'm building can easily get by with (much) less than 2 GB. And if I would be developing something that uses up 8+ GB by itself, I probably want a beefier workstation with 32 GB or more anyway. It's just not an issue, RAM is plentiful, and it's in there to be used.

All my laptops have 32GB of RAM. And if I had no other options I probably could've been stuck with CLion. However as I've already mention CodeLite and QtCreator are multiplatform, very responsive, work just fine as an IDE and eat very little memory comparatively to CLion. I often have to test big in memory datasets so I have way better ways of wasting RAM.

That's fine, because it's an IDE and a new dev machine tends to have more than 16gb of ram.

No it is not fine. The only impression I get from glorified notepads consuming gigabytes of RAM is the ever increasing desire to send them to /dev/null where they belong. My opinion of course

Some machines, and some people, have other uses for RAM than the text editor.

Sorry but I have other uses for RAM then to feed sloppy environments.