On Tuesday, 15 November 2016 at 17:31:04 UTC, Nick Sabalausky
wrote:
I don't really use emacs, and (thought I admit I'm not 100%
certain), I don't think much of what I use launches (or at
least needs to launch) separate commands for each keypress
(sounds like bad software engineering to me, but that's just my
gut impression, maybe I'm wrong).
As the threshold of what performance is acceptable rises, so do
the possibilities. Things that sounded like bad engineering years
ago can be considered perfectly acceptable today (e.g. why go
through the effort of integrating something by writing a library
and inventing an API, if you can just spawn processes for every
operation at negligible cost, and greatly lower development and
maintenance effort). Granted, certainly not everything will
benefit from I/O performance, but a lot of things do.
That does remind me though: Are hybrid drives still a thing?
They sounded like a good idea (at least for laptops, where you
can usually only have one internal drive),
Ah, I missed that you were talking in the context of a laptop.
One thing to note is that as optical disk drives become less
useful, dual-HDD laptops are more common. I've also seen some
models (ThinkPads, IIRC?) with a small amount of on-board flash
memory that can be used as a cache. Caching with two drives can
also be done in software (bcache/lvmcache), though if you have
two drives, IMO it's simpler to separate the data yourself.
