heavyweight
High-overhead; baroque; code-intensive; featureful, but costly. Especially 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 use 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.
Opposite: "lightweight". Usage: now borders on technical especially in the
compound "heavyweight process".
(1994-12-22)
Nearby terms:
heat sink « heat slug « heavy metal « heavyweight
» heavy wizardry » Hebbian learning » heisenbug
|
