I wasn’t sure where to post this, but I was wondering if the Typst developers could please raise the priority of the memory consumption bugs? RAM is very expensive right now and I’ve found the out of memory issues to make Typst effectively unusable on old machines. In fact, Typst is the main reason why I’m hesitant to purchase a Macbook Neo because it only has 8 gb of RAM and on my old 16 gb of RAM machine, typst already took up all the RAM.
There are a number of Github issues since at least 2024 requesting that RAM usage be somehow limited:
The most realistic thing would be to replace all allocations by a custom allocator which is the same but counts the total currently allocated size and panics if limited reached. This would only work for typst code and not for allocating dependency crates. But you probably want to have a memory limit and still get the full pdf result, right? This would be much harder and would require heavy rewrite of the typst compiler.
A heavy rewrite sounds like a lot of work, but I would think that the ability for Typst to be able to comfortably and reliably run on something like a Macbook Neo or even Raspberry Pi could be really important for adoption of Typst amongst new users.
Typst is already good enough for submitting the generated PDFs to journals, but the RAM usage is really limited who and how someone can actually use it. The webapp isn’t necessarily an option for everyone and even if it was, I can’t imagine that the RAM usage is a good thing for Typst’s cloud costs!