People use WhatsApp on the computer? From the Windows Store of all places?

Must be a tiny percentage, which is why this version is now a basic web wrapper now.

Anyway, I’d remind everyone that “using” RAM doesn’t mean “would not function with less RAM.”

Many applications just use a lot if it’s available.

RAM is not really something you explicitly ration.

> RAM is not really something you explicitly ration.

I guess this modern attitude is how we are where we are.

RAM is absolutely a scarce precious resource that we optimize for. At least we used to, and some of us still do.

"RAM is not really something you explicitly ration."

It most certainly is. My old pc ran on 8MB of ram. Modern ones need 16GB for a comfortable experience. They do not do much more than I needed back then. I think it's reasonable to expect a simple chat app to not take up 128 times as much memory as my entire PC had when I was young.

Before reminding everyone of a theory, did you check where that theory applies in this discussion of an app in practice?

Also, even in theory the issue isn't only with "wouldn't function", but "would function slower due to eg disk swaps / cause other apps to function slower".

> Anyway, I’d remind everyone that “using” RAM doesn’t mean “would not function with less RAM.”

> Many applications just use a lot if it’s available.

Some of that memory isn't going to be touched again, and will eventually be moved to swap, but it still pushed things out of RAM to be there and is a troublemaker.

The rest of that memory will be needed again, so if it gets swapped out it'll lag badly when you switch back to the program.

Either way 99% of programs are not doing any kind of intelligent use of spare memory. If you see them doing something that looks wasteful, that's because they're being wasteful.

The one thing to remember is that at the OS level, disk cache pretty much qualifies as free memory. But that's unrelated to this issue.

I use it extensively. For years Whatsapp had a lovely native windows app and now they're replacing it with this horrible bloated thing

> Anyway, I’d remind everyone that “using” RAM doesn’t mean “would not function with less RAM.”

Except when something really does need more RAM, and fails. LLVM for example having, somehow, become a bit chonky and now fails to compile on 32-bit OpenBSD systems because it wants more memory than is available. Less bloated software of course does not suffer from this problem, and continues to run on still functional 32-bit systems.

> Many applications just use a lot if it’s available.

Xorg is using 92M, irssi 21M (bloated, but I've been lazy about finding something leaner), xenodm 12M. That's the top three. Oh, Windows? Yeah. About that. Best you can hope for is not to catch too much of the splatter. (What passes for Mac OS X these days also seems fairly dismal.)

> RAM is not really something you explicitly ration.

Paperclips were hung on the rack doors to make it easier to poke the wee little red reset button when some poorly written software went all gibblesquik (as poorly written software is wont to do) and the OOM killer could not cope and, whelp, reset time. Elsewhere, RAM is explicitly rationed—perhaps certain aspects of timesharing have been somewhat forgotten in this benighted era of bloat?—and malloc will return NULL, something certain programmers often fail to check for, which is generally followed by the kernel taking the error-ridden code out back and shooting it.

I also use it a lot but the app has always been terrible. I forget exactly what the problems are but I think the text input becomes unresponsive and it becomes unusable.