Moar memory. Moar!

Mon, 26 Oct 2009 20:20:00 +0100

Just installed the second beta of Visual Studio 2010 and got my 3D framework up and running in it. Overall it feels like a good upgrade from 2008. Intellisense for C++ actually works for a change. C++0x is partially there. Red squiggly underlines highlight just how bad a typist you are. It's all jolly lovely, except one thing - the memory usage. Oh, the memory usage.

Due to hardware troubles I'm currently stuck on a laptop with 2GB of memory and while not exactly excessive these days, 2GB should certainly be enough for most desktop uses. Especially for something that is essentially a glorified text-editor.

Yeah, from a standstill to just opening my framework solution VS2010 gobbles up over 400MB of memory. During compilation that increases to well over 700MB. Add to that the gig or so that Windows (7 in this case) already uses just sitting there, and you're dangerously close to swapping to disk on my 2GB machine. Start a Firefox session, Photoshop or, god forbid, run a Virtual Machine, and you're there:

It really is excruciatingly slow if you have anything else running on the computer (like, you know, the application you're developing). Swapping is unavoidable. The slow disk in my laptop obviously doesn't help when that happens, but when VS2008 can do the same job using 120MB and 300MB respectively, I'm left scratching my head as to what is going on over in Redmond.

It's like they're not even trying.

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Fri, 09 Oct 2009 02:16:00 +0200

So I've finally decided to set up a proper site here with a portfolio, my CV and a blog. I'm not yet sure what I'll be blogging about but I'll probably try to keep it more technical and less personal/political. Mind numbingly boring, if you will.

Speaking of mind numbingly boring... Working on this site has really reaffirmed my love for Silverstripe (on which it is based). It went from Photoshop mockup to fully fledged and (mostly) working site in a day and a half of relatively relaxed work. HTML, CSS, template, some custom Silverstripe widgetry, the lot. Even the code for applying and caching (server-side) the frames around the portfolio images only took a few hours to do.

Now true, Silverstripe has a lot of twisty, impenetrable, supposedly OO code, and trying to step through it to find out how on earth you ended up in that function can make grown programmers weep. The end result, though, is so deliciously customisable I just don't care. And when I don't care about stylistic issues, you know something good is happening.

Need to customise some HTML? Override a template Include. Need to make a custom page type? Inherit "Page" and write a few lines of boilerplate for the database fields you're adding. Need to add an arbitrary amount of images to a page? Scour the net for hours looking for info on why on earth the DataObjectManager is randomly failing when generating icons for objects containing two separate Image fields... Okay, so it's not perfect. But the thing is, whatever you need to do, there is a way. And you usually don't need many lines of code to achieve it.

I very much approve.

Erik's technical blog

Moar memory. Moar!

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