The purpose of limiting memory use is so your computer does not become laggy as you run out of memory. We don’t do it for its own sake.

But then, what’s the point in using an inherently laggy technique to save memory?

The purpose of not wasting memory is so we have free memory to use productively.

What's the point of having 64-128GB of RAM if we're using apps that eat 10GB to do the same things we were doing 20 years ago using a few MB?

Was going to answer almost the same.

This is my pet project, a desktop app for working with xAI models & capabilities, so by "performance" I mostly mean "pleasant to use" (as it goes, simple & opinionated). Technically speaking, something like: stable FPS, no visible lags, and the ability to scroll smoothly while the model is streaming.

Regarding the parent comment: yes, memory is important, and I absolutely get the point. There should be a red line, for sure. But I will not sacrifice UX, productivity, and simple pleasure from using software just to save a few hundred megabytes of RAM (or even a few gigabytes) especially for an app I spend hours with behind the screen.

Memory consumption can & should be optimised with proper engineering for sure. As lags & inadequate performance in basic SDK-level primitives are much harder (impossible?) to fix from the outside.

How about running many tasks on the machine at the same time?