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".

(1994-12-22)