heavyweight

created by everyone
(idea) by Jargon (2.1 y) (print)   (I like it!) Thu Jul 19 2001 at 10:16:47
heavy wizardry = H = Hed Rat

heavyweight 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'.

--The Jargon File version 4.3.1, ed. ESR, autonoded by rescdsk.

Y'know, if you log in, you can write something here, or contact authors directly on the site. Create a New User if you don't already have an account.