[athyuttamre]

Atom loads plugins in the main thread, whereas VSCode runs them in a background thread. This alone makes a huge difference.

More here: https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/extensions/our-approach

[Touche]

Same excuse Firefox used to always make for its slowness; it's extensions fault. In the case of Atom, it's slower without any extensions installed, in my experience.

[athyuttamre]

Totally possible, since Atom's core functionality is also plugin-based. Stuff like syntax highlighting etc. IIRC.

[untoreh]

a simple example: on vscode, opening a file from remote fs does not lock the ui, atom (and sublime) freezes. vscode is pretty concurrent! the only thing somewhat slow seems to be regex matches which are single threaded but I am not sure they lock the ui