JargonFile/entries/heavyweight.txt

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2014-04-26 10:52:28 -04:00
heavyweight
2014-04-26 11:54:15 -04:00
adj. [common] High-overhead; baroque ; code-intensive; featureful, but
costly. Esp. used of communication protocols, language designs, and any sort
of implementation in which maximum generality and/or ease of implementation
has been pushed at the expense of mundane considerations such as speed,
memory utilization, and startup time. EMACS is a heavyweight editor; X is an
extremely heavyweight window system. This term isn't pejorative, but one
hacker's heavyweight is another's elephantine and a third's monstrosity.
Oppose lightweight. Usage: now borders on techspeak, especially in the
compound heavyweight process.