[lsiunsuex]

"Theia is designed from the ground to run on Desktop and Cloud"

Which means it's an Electron app - which means between this and Chrome, it sucks down tons of ram and processing power.

Really hoping Nova from panic.com is as good as it looks / native MacOS app.

[GordonS]

This Electron-bashing is getting rather old - it's possible to write crappy code on any platform.

Yes, some Electron apps are resource hogs, but many are not. VS Code is a perfect example of how Electron can enable development of a performant, cross-platform IDE.

[abjKT26nO8]

> This Electron-bashing is getting rather old - it's possible to write crappy code on any platform.

It's possible to write crappy code on any platform, but some platforms (like Electron) make writing apps that don't suck impossible.

> Yes, some Electron apps are resource hogs, but many are not. VS Code is a perfect example of how Electron can enable development of a performant, cross-platform IDE.

All Electron apps are resource hogs, including VS Code. Just because Slack made it a standard to ignore the fact that not everybody has loads of RAM and that there are other apps running on the system, doesn't mean everybody's standards of performance and UX should race to the bottom.

[GordonS]

I strongly disagree, and I have to question if you've actually used VS Code.

I use VS Code every day, and relative to it's capabilities, I think memory usage is good. It also starts almost instantaneously, and is very snappy when using.

[odshoifsdhfs]

I am not bashing on Electron, but I have seen slowdowns and memory hogging on VS in large projects (Typescript). I end up restarting it every 3-4 hours to get it back a baseline speed.

[smcleod]

You’re not at all alone, working across several teams of devs and infra engineers people are always whinging about electron apps that eat up resources, kill their batteries and slow down over time, slack and VSCode are prime examples.

[abjKT26nO8]

I tried it, saw rendering glitches like the ones you see when you scroll a webpage using Firefox or Chromium on X, looked at the RAM usage, saw that its UI is its own thing that doesn't integrate with the rest of the system[1] and concluded that it's not for me.

[1]: Well, this last point isn't all that exceptional on Linux, but it adds up and I suspect that for people using macOS this is a downgrade.

[GordonS]

Not that I doubt you, but I think your experience is atypical. I've never seen rendering glitches on Windows, Linux or MacOS (I use all 3,although mostly Windows & MacOS), and I've been using it since forever. A totally scientific straw poll of colleagues finds the same.

[tpush]

> VS Code is a perfect example of how Electron can enable development of a performant, cross-platform IDE.

VS Code is unable to scroll text without dropping frames on my MBP 2013. Meanwhile even Xcode is (graphically) smooth as butter.

[blumomo]

I have no problems with Electron, it enables many good products. I for my part however moved from VSCode to (Neo)Vim because VSCode made my maxed out 2017 Macbook Pro scream (the fan) and super slow (pytest taking significantly longer in the integrated terminal). I couldn't be more happier for this move. Thanks to VSCode!

[benbristow]

What would you expect from a cloud editor?

FYI, Visual Studio Code is an Electron app. And it's very performant.

[sgt]

It's performant because it's sucking your resources dry with a massive memory footprint, which is possible thanks to virtual memory. Doesn't mean it's ideal.

[benbristow]

I realise that this might sound privileged/gate-keeping but if you're a developer in 2020 I'd expect you to at least have 8GB of RAM. I'd say it's the minimum you should have for a decent computing experience nowadays. I have 16GB and usually idle around 50% usage with just a general task load. Especially with Windows 10. Not that it's a good thing but it seems to be the way things are going.

1/8th of your memory for your IDE doesn't sound too bad?

I've seen native tools use more.

[thrownaway954]

Your browser using just as much, if not more than VS code does so try again. Nowadays an IDE using 1 gig of ram isn't that horrible when it saves you tons of development time with it's tooling.

[robenkleene]

Why does the browser also using a lot of RAM mean VS Code should? Aren’t those different applications with different purposes? E.g., is it equally valid to compare VS Code to Excel or Photoshop?

The main problem with this argument is just a few years ago, before Atom and VS Code, most people were using editors like Sublime Text that use an order of magnitude less resources and are still significantly faster than the Electron editors. Regardless of whether VS Code is a better editor, or a better architecture, it's still an interesting question whether the dramatic increase in resources was necessary.

[okal]

This is interesting to me. Do you care _why_ the apps you use are performant, if they already are? Is it noticeably impacting the performance of other apps you're actively using?

[robenkleene]

The implication of “sucking your resources dry with a massive memory footprint” in the comment your replying to, is that in order to make VS Code fast, it slows down your system in other ways. I don’t know how valid that is, but it’s certainly not “caring why”, it's about the other performance consequences that aren’t VS Code itself running slowly.