If it can run something as hungry as a webbrowser, of course you can do coding. The resources to run vim (or even emacs) are tiny in today's world. You probably wont be doing any 3D work or massive amounts of video manipulation, but even in the latter case it will be more than powerful enough.
I was thinking more of compilation times, but of course if you write JS for example in VIM then this is not an issue (given that it can run a browser).
Yeah, when I've tried, those kind of things seemed like could get really annoying, but for those I have a Proxmox install in another handout (4Gb RAM laptop with broken screen) :)
Do people write compiled programs any more? (en-mass) Especially large ones?
I remember compiling a 2.4 kernel on a 486 once, only kernel to suppose the PCMCIA network card. It didn't go quickly. If you really want to compile the program, vou can always do the compilation on a server.
Of course they do. Where do you think you get your kernels, drivers, firmware for various IoT from etc.? Compiling a small (~100 MB), custom OS purely (as much as it's possible) from source code can still take hours even on modern laptop.
Well yes, of course, however as a percentage of people writing code, how many write in a traditional compile-once run-many language which are large enough projects they take a significant amount of time to compile.
When dkms recompiles one custome module I use on an 8 year old laptop it takes a few seconds. Even when you're working on projects that take a long time (say on ffmpeg), you're not typically recompiling the entire thing each time. On the other hand doing a full build for all architectures takes hours on a desktop, so is far more sensible to ship off to a build service running elsewhere on the network.
Large scale compiling on a desktop machine feels like a fairly niche problem compared with the vast majority of "code" written today.
