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".



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heartbeat
heatseeker
heat sink
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heavy metal
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heavyweight
TANSTAAFL
heavy wizardry
Hebbian learning
heisenbug
Helen Keller mode
Helix