He won't know until all the templates are instantiated...

That's a fantastic joke, thank you :D

AAA video games do that for you :P Well, it isn't the programming part that uses the ram(although yes, building our codebase takes about 40 minutes and uses gigabytes of ram without using distributed build), but just starting up local server + client + editor easily uses 80-100GB of ram since ALL of the assets are loaded in.

Did you have the chance to try your setup on an M1? If it worked for your sister, although you seem to have way higher requirements, is there anything to say it wouldn't work for you?

I'm asking because I read a lot of comments when it was released that it just doesn't need as much RAM because $REASONS. I wouldn't put my money on this, but I'm curious if this assumption holds water now that people have had time to try it out.

Edit: there are such comments further down the thread where it seems to still be a mystery: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26913643

So I'd really like to know where this magic breaks down: if you're used to 128GB or RAM, will the M1 feel sluggish?

I doubt it's possible to try a AAA dev setup on OSX at all, and, for whatever it's worth 64G workstations were "hand-me-downs" at my previous gig (AAA gamedev), I doubt there's much magic that can make "64 gig is not nearly enough" go to "16G is fine"

I also have doubts but that's what the marketing hype has been claiming for some time now, so I'm really curious about real-world experiences and where the hype breaks down. The debate is often "I need way more RAM!" vs "But this is a new paradigm and old constraints don't apply!".

AAA gamedev might be the wrong demographic though, since it's mostly done on Windows (I think?).

Well, 100% of my development tools are Windows only so I can't really give it a try, sorry :-)

I'd suggest people just get the larger ram unless they're tight on budget. I know Apple's trying to argue otherwise and people will agree with them. But I can't hear it as anything other than thinking molded to fit a prior decision. For what it's worth, and not scientific, but reported "percent used" statistics seem to grow slower for the 16 gig models than the 8 gig models (from the smart utils).

When VS decides to disk bomb you or uses literally 120GB of ram because its auto scaling trips up.

I'm equal parts happy and terrified that MS announced x64 version of VS recently, because I know it will just mean VS can now scale infinitely. At least right now the core process has to stay within the 4GB limit :P

So instead of attacking Microsoft about giving VS, we attack apple for not having enough ram lol

>What on earth are you programming?

Earth. He is programming the earth.

One example is linking QtWebEngine (basically Chromium) which can sometimes take upwards of 64 GB of RAM.

How did chrome eat safari’s launch when they were both based on WebKit. amazing !

Large code bases in an IDE, program dumps, large applications (the software I write will gladly use 10-20gb in some use cases), VMs, large ML training sets, &c.

128gb is likely overkill, but I can see a use case depending on what you're doing.

I think everyone should get more ram than they think they'll ever need. 32 gigs is that number for me, but if I thought I'd get even close to using 64 gigs, might as well go for 128.

Same setup as him, I'm working on llvm. It's very nice to be able to test the compiler by running and simulating on a threadripper CX3990, means I don't have to run everything past the build server