heavy from FOLDOC

heavy metal

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".

Last updated: 1994-12-22

heavy wizardry

Code or designs that trade on a particularly intimate knowledge or experience of a particular operating system or language or complex application interface. Distinguished from deep magic, which trades more on arcane *theoretical* knowledge. Writing device drivers is heavy wizardry; so is interfacing to X (sense 2) without a toolkit. Especially found in source-code comments of the form "Heavy wizardry begins here".

Compare voodoo programming.

[Jargon File]

Nearby terms:

heat sink ♦ heat slug ♦ heavy metal ♦ heavyweight ♦ heavy wizardry ♦ Hebbian learning

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