For systems where development and deployment is completely separate, we can live with development system using a lot of memory. But the strict separation of deployment and development may not be possible in the future. The trends of the last years, for example the trend towards very agile and incremental styles of devlopement, move away from a strict separation of development and deployment. The programing languages and IDEs of the future will reflect this trend and provide far more features for analysis and developement at deployment time.
We will thus be faced with the need of providing the IDE features in more memory contrained enviroments.
How can memory footprint be optimized?
There has been some work on e.g. AST compression for mobile code. Can these schemes be adopted to be useable with extensible and changing source representations?
-- MarcusDenker