heavyweight

[common] High-overhead; {baroque}; code-intensive; featureful, but costly. Esp. 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 utilization, 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}. Oppose lightweight. Usage: now borders on techspeak, especially in the compound heavyweight process.

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