Sweating the small stuff in Java
<h1>Sometimes, You’re on Your Own</h1>
<p>Every once in a while, we are required as application developers to roll up our sleeves and find ways to squeeze performance or memory savings beyond the built-in capabilities of our language and libraries.</p>
<p>I started programming professionally in DOS/Clipper in the late 1980s when 640K was the memory limit, so I was accustomed to memory-constrained programming. I wasn’t used to anything else until I started programming in Smalltalk, where I had access to hundreds of megabytes of memory.</p>
<p>Towards the end of the 1990s, I worked in Smalltalk, loading decent-sized object graphs into memory and doing things at blazing memory speed. Processes that used to run in minutes in DOS/Clipper could be completed in hundreds of milliseconds. I was working with a 32-bit memory constraint, but I never seemed to get close to the edge of the RAM limit to worry about running out of memory with the domain I was working in.</p>
<p>This was a good progress. Memory was plentiful and fast. Life as a programmer was good. I hadn’t yet encountered a big data application. That would happen soon enough.</p>
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