it is a very strange world when my terminal emulator program is taking up 1.2GB of memory.

@aurynn From the hellsite:

@lgw4 pretty much yeah.

Electron everything was such a mistake.

@aurynn

2010s: the browser is the new thin client

2020s: what if we bundled the browser separately into each application

😢

@aurynn I still remember being concerned when my terminal emulator was taking up nearly 16kiB of RAM. Admittedly that was 1/4 of the address map on the system, and the screen RAM took another 16kiB. But even so, a terminal emulator taking over a GiB of RAM is very “do you have a memory leak? Sure seems like a memory leak”.

@ewenmcneill well, I have, uh, 40 open? And each one has over 10k lines of back buffer. And a full GPU display buffer.

@aurynn @ewenmcneill Even if every line in those buffers took up a whole kilobyte, I think that's still rather a lot

@aurynn 40 * 10k lines * 255 bytes/line is still under 100MiB. Plus say a generous 25 MiB for code.

Your terminal program is taking at least an order of magnitude more RAM than I’d expect :-/

@aurynn can you imagine devoting an entire 26 bytes to the date turnover routine?

@aurynn I still don't get why terminal emulators require OpenGL

@buherator @aurynn Allegedly for faster rendering. And to be fair, alacritty does feel much faster than urxvt, or xterm. (I didn’t measure anything, though.)

@schrotthaufen @aurynn What do you need speed for in a terminal? No offense but your fingers/eyes are pbbly much slower than most things a computer does.

@buherator @aurynn Tools that produce a lot of terminal output run faster. Still not as fast as 2>&1 mylog, though. I think we can agree on “1.2GB RAM for a terminal emulator is bad”.

@schrotthaufen @aurynn I dug a bit about this last week and also found that ppl associate speed with large outputs, thanks for confirming! IMHO if you dump as much data that this acceleration matters, you won't be able to properly interpret that output anyway, so instead of messing with a GPU I'll just stick with redirects and grep.

@buherator @aurynn Agreed.

@buherator @aurynn while Alacritty specifically currently doesn't support it, I could imagine that offloading Sixel rendering to the GPU might be a good idea.

More generally, one might argue that on many desktop systems the GPU sits around IDLing anyway, and that offloading graphics-related computations to the GPU is "the right thing to do". But I do see that this also adds complexity, possible bugs/vulns etc.

I'm personally kinda undecided on what's the right take here.