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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
Opposite: "lightweight". Usage: now borders on technical
especially in the compound "heavyweight process".
(1994-12-22)