Contents page

Index (83KB)

heavyweight

   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'.