Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by veidr 3285 days ago
Yes, but while Sublime is still way faster, there's not much human-time-perceptible difference between Sublime and VS Code, and there's still (even in this new 1.18) a huge difference between Atom and the other two.

Sublime (or really any competently-designed native editor) does indeed use way less memory for any text-editing task than any Electron-based app. But memory is fast. VS Code shows that an Electron-based app can exhibit performance basically equivalent to a native app at most tasks (other than opening that initial window, where it's still an order of magnitude slower).

So I think the performance problem with Atom is more Atom than Electron.

(Still, though, if you only have 16GB RAM, you probably don't want to use more than 4 Electron-based apps.)

1 comments

> there's not much human-time-perceptible difference between Sublime and VS Code

VS Code chokes pretty horribly on 'large' files and is really slow to load. It also has noticeable typing latency vis a vis Sublime.

Hmm, I have never seen any typing latency with VS Code, but I use fast computers and few plugins. It is indeed slow during initial loading, and unusable with large files.

My comment wasn't intended to advocate for inefficient software based on web browser cores; I was just trying to note that most of Atom's abysmal performance issues seem to be more Atom's fault than Electron's, since VSCode is so much better.

Sublime, and any competently-designed native text editor, will always be faster than one based on Electron. Still, I leave both editors (and a few others) open throughout my workday.