[adam_arthur]

VS Code seems quite fast to me

There's a reason software trends towards higher level, less performant abstractions over time. The takes about chrome being a memory hog or electron being inherently slow are very tired at this point

[saagarjha]

You might be tired of them, but that doesn't mean they're wrong.

[adam_arthur]

And garbage collected languages are slower than managed ones. Should we avoid garbage collected languages for all software then?

It's just demonstrates a very poor grasp of what actually matters in the world. And the performance gap is greatly exaggerated.

Most people would agree VS Code is very snappy, and it's written in JS and browser based. There's no inherent reason they have to be slow. And we don't double the RAM in computers every few years to leave it unused

[newaccount74]

The problem is that Electron apps are slower today than native apps were 10 years ago, despite computers getting faster and available RAM on my machine quadrupling.

I understand why developers like Electron, but like everything it's a tradeoff.

[yywwbbn]

They are mainly slow only because the developers don’t care about performance not because of Electron

[happymellon]

They use Electron because they don't care about performance.

[ryandrake]

Exactly. This is a developer culture problem as much as it is a technology problem. Developers care less about runtime performance than other development factors, so they choose technologies that sacrifice runtime performance for developer speed and comfort. Is the root cause even deeper? Why are we so focused on developer productivity? Do individual developers really not care about performance, or is it that their companies are insisting that they poop out whatever crap they can in as little time as possible?

> > Electron apps are slower today than native apps were 10 years ago, despite computers getting faster and available RAM on my machine quadrupling.

Desktop software today seems to be slower than desktop software even 20 years ago, when RAM and hard disks not only had less capacity, but were also slower just as CPUs were slower. As an industry, we have sacrificed so much at the holy altar of Developer Productivity.

[ohgodplsno]

If you don't think having to run _an entire chromium stack_ just to display something, actively bypassing all of the OS's rendering facilities to draw some stuff on a canvas, I have a bridge to sell you.

[jen20]

> And garbage collected languages are slower than managed ones.

What..? Many common managed platforms are also garbage collected - .NET and Java, for example.

If I assume you misspoke with “managed” it still is untrue that garbage collection means “slower” because “slower” says nothing about whether you are measuring throughout or latency.

[happymellon]

I only know internet commentators to talk about how VS Code is fast enough. In meat space, no one has ever said that VS Code is performant, just that it is free and X company has standardised on it.

[vagrantJin]

> And we don't double the RAM in computers every few years to leave it unused

On a point of clarity.

Who is we?

I don't want my browser taking up 14gigs of my 16gigs just to watch a cat meme...thanks.

I would like my experience to be improved and elevated while using less resources. Efficiency.

> It's just demonstrates a very poor grasp of what actually matters in the world.

I find this particular statement...lacks any modicum of humility. One might say it ventures into dangerously callous.

Put simply, outside first world economies, most of humanity does not earn enough money to buy a new macbook pro/ Dell XPS every 2 years nor have access to fast internet...relying on crappy broadband instead.

Even those people deserve efficient software that does its utmost to not hog the little resources so they can get things done yes?

[kaba0]

VS code has plenty of important parts written in some native language though.

[happymellon]

The biggest problem with VS Code is that it doesn't actually do anything, all functionality is performed via plugins which have dramatically different performance.

So most of the time people are not discussing the same application experience. VS Code with nothing installed isn't that bad, once you start actually using it for code then performance drops off a cliff.