[jillesvangurp]

It's a bit theoretical because no editors exist that are smaller that do all of what vs code does. And a lot of what it does relies heavily on the notion that it's running in a browser. So, just tossing that out won't fly since you kind of need it for at least some of the features.

It's only when you subjectively remove all the features that you don't care about that it becomes doable to make smaller editors. And that's fine. But you can't have your cake and eat it.

The reason most people don't care is because it simply doesn't matter. Not even a little bit. Laptops are cheap. Memory is cheap. CPU is cheap. Your time is not. And it takes investing your time to make this stuff more optimal and faster. And VS code just does a lot of nice things that make you more productive. I use Intellij myself which uses even more resources. But it's a bit smarter and saves me even more time. The point with both is that you lose more than you gain by replacing them with something faster. It's not worth it.

My first computer was a commodore 64, so I'm well aware what that thing could do (and couldn't do). I'm writing this on a M1 macbook. Orders of magnitudes faster, doing things I could not imagine back when I had a commodore 64, etc. You can have one second hand / refurbished for next to nothing. Basically below my day rate when I'm consulting.

[maccard]

Back in 2014 my company switched from Skype to this hot new tool called Slack for messaging. On my £10,000 workstation with dual xeon processors, 64GB memory and a 1TB SSD, you know what was the second most resource intensive app after my c++ compiler, and above my IDE? Slack. We used to close our chat program to compile to save the 1GB memory it was using.

> It's a bit theoretical because no editors exist that are smaller that do all of what vs code does

You can't ever compare two things if you look for all features to match. Sublime is a pretty good comparison - it's wicked fast, has a bunch of the same features and language extensions. Emacs handles unicode just fine and has a huge extension surface area.

> The reason most people don't care is because it simply doesn't matter

Hard disagree here - the reason people don't care is because features sell, and as you said, the alternative option isn't there. I work in Unreal Engine most of the time, and about 3-4 years ago, there was an almost overnight exodus of game programmers who would live and die by Visual Studio who switched to Rider, primarily because it was faster than VS+VAX.

> Laptops are cheap. Memory is cheap. CPU is cheap. Your time is not

This only applies with one application. Now add Slack/Teams, Postman, Outlook, FF/Chrome, Spotify in the mix, and all of a sudden I'm running 6 full web browsers duplicated with all their resources isolated, using more menoey and CPU than Intellij does. I'm fine with Intellij pegging my 32 core thread ripper to index millions of lines of code. I'm less fine with Postman using more CPU than Intellij to display a json document.

> Im writing this on a M1 macbook

Depending on what software you're working on, your users aren't using M1 Macbookd. My partner's work machine is a5 year old i3 with 8GB of RAM. It's borderline unusable with teams and Outlook running IMO. But the person who benchmarks teams is doing so on the M1 MacBook.

[jillesvangurp]

We're talking about developer tools here. Editors are aimed at developers. You can expect developers to have reasonably decent hardware. If you are working wit unreal like you say you do, you presumably aren't using a ten year old macbook air to do your work. That would be madness.

Anyway, end users care even less. The paying user variety typically has a newish computer (of the last five years or so). The rest are not a great revenue stream. But of course, if you develop for users stuck on really old crappy laptops, of course you are going to invest your precious time in making sure they get a great experience and make all sorts of compromises to ensure they do. But for the rest of the users, good enough is good enough. You'll see from your revenue/usage statistics what that is.

I find the people that whine the most about this topic are exactly those people you should expect to have decent hardware (i.e. developers). Either way, use things that are useful to you.

Spotify and Slack, Teams, etc. seem to be doing OK with user popularity for example and don't seem to be getting a lot of churn over their application performance. And of course a lot of this stuff is used on mobile as well. I've used both for the last ten years without much issues on modestly sized laptops. 16GB is more than enough for me running stuff like that, vs code, intellij, a bunch of docker things, and a few other bits and bobs.

People using MS Windows seem to get a particularly rough experience. That's why lots of developers prefer mac or linux based machines.

[bcaxis]

> Slack/Teams, Postman, Outlook, FF/Chrome, Spotify in the mix, and all of a sudden I'm running 6 full web browsers duplicated with all their resources isolated

If those apps were PWAs instead, it would mean no extra browser copies are running. In my experience this only really accounts for 70-100 MB per app for the browser copy. No reason slack couldn't be a PWA, same with Spotify.

I'm not really sure how slack and others use so much RAM. I've built quite functional, complicated, and non trivial web apps. Mine typically use <50 MB with some coming in at 20-25 MB. When I'm deploying in electron I'm still in the 80-150 range.

The biggest performance questions for me are network latency vs local data and figuring out ways to mitigate network latency. The difference between 200 ms navigation and 5 ms navigation is pretty stark. Even if most people don't flinch at 200 ms.

[dist-epoch]

Since your time is so valuable and you are obviously very upset about this, your company should pay Spotify to write a more efficient app.

Or your company should buy you a new 96 core Threadripper 1 TB RAM system so that when you use Spotify/Slack/Postman it doesn't impact your productivity.

[maccard]

If your only response is a personal attack, don't say anything at all.

[dist-epoch]

I was just reflecting your thinking - somehow you feel that Postman/Slack/.... owe something to you. Pay them to do what you want, or stop using them.

You feel entitled to use a $10K machine to compensate for slow IntelliJ for maximum productivity and convenience, yet deny others (Postman/Slack/...) using the most productive and convenient technology for them (Electron). And while continuing to use their convenient products, you say they are bad. Use IRC, use curl instead of Postman.

The Postman programmers say the same thing: our users have $3K+ machines, no point in optimizing code to be fast, instead lets add more features since it's clearly working and our users are not switching. Obviously they love the iteration speed that Electron gives us.

[maccard]

> Pay them to do what you want, or stop using them.

I've been a paying slack customer for a decade at this point. I pulled up my email, my support ticket for "slack is using more ram than visual studio" was in February 2015. I don't have the political sway over Salesforce to makthem make these sorts of decisions.

> You feel entitled to use a $10K machine to compensate for slow...

Youre doing it again. I don't feel entitled. I don't have a choice in my chat app, my employer forces it on me. And even if I did, slack is on the whole the least worst option. As for postman. I did the same thing. I was a paying customer, I submitted support tickets, provided traces when asked and ultimately I did decide to change tool.

> while continuing to use their convenient products, you say they are bad.

Am I not allowed to have an opinion just because I have a fast machine? Am I not allowed to want my software to be better?

> The Postman programmers say the same thing:

No they say "performance is a top priority for us, we're sorry you're not happy with it. Please send us your hardware specs" and the ticket gets auto closed after 2 weeks.

> Obviously they love the iteration speed that Electron gives us.

It's not just electron - snappy electron apps exist. Startup time aside. VSCode is pretty damn good. Figma is an excellent example of how good it can be (and if you want to compare what it looks like when a company cares Vs a company doesn't, see figma and Miro).

[dist-epoch]

> I've been a paying slack customer for a decade at this point

$10/month is not what I meant by "paying them". I worked at a company where clients would routinely pay us $200K to implement a particular niche feature which was not on the roadmap. If they asked for a non-roadmap feature, yes, the ticket would be closed "not-planned".

[zelphirkalt]

For me that wouldn't work, because the impact Slack has is not measured in time loss directly (or at least not only, since Slack is truly a laggy piece of crap), but instead in annoyance and feeling bad about using basically spyware on my system. Basically each interaction adds a bit of pain and questioning, why I am even doing this shit.

Not GP, but they could buy me a 1024 core monster if it exists, it would still not solve the problem of Slack.

[guappa]

I have been running localslackirc (it's in debian) to access slack from IRC.

I still have to open it in the browser every once in a while, to search old threads or other stuff that is not supported. But day to day I can do everything in irc. There is also a weechat plugin afaik.

It's a bit annoying to configure the access but it seems the tokens never expire (or have not yet expired) so it shouldn't be too frequent for you either.

[zelphirkalt]

Thanks, I might try that soon.

[vidarh]

Next to nothing of what VS code does depends on it running in a browser other than to the extent VS Code has made it so.

It's not special. If anything it's one of the most clunky editor I've used because it tries to shoehorn everything into a convoluted UI. It's because my time matters to me I avoid VS Code as much as possible.

The problem with VS Code is not that it's too slow, or too memory hungry. It could use far less, sure. And it could do so without losing any of the things about it that makes me dislike it.

[jillesvangurp]

Markdown and html, image, and other previews, documentation, connectivity, it's a lot more than you think.

If you don't like it, use something else of course. But there are valid reasons for it being browser based and a lot of people choose to use it at this point.

[vidarh]

None of which requires VS code itself to be browser based, and of which do not benefit much from using a browser.

A lot of people choosing to use it is besides the point being made, which is not that people won't use it, but that it could be a lot leaner without sacrificing functionality.

[nox101]

there are other advantages to running in the browser. The fact that the editor is written in JavaScript/Typescript html/css means it runs in any browser. It's why there's been an explosion of online IDEs like codesandbox.io, stackblitz, github codespaces, google code cloud, repl.it and 100s of others.

[bigstrat2003]

My time is free. I'm not going to see a dime for any time I save by using this tool or that tool on my computer. Hardware, on the other hand, is not free, so I prefer to sacrifice time for being able to use less expensive hardware (within reason).

Of course, Sublime Text exists and does everything I want from VSCode at a fraction of the hardware usage. So I don't have to choose one or the other, because actual good software exists.

[saagarjha]

If your time is free I think you're devaluing yourself ;)

[boomlinde]

Consider an economy of time, where you have a finite amount of time to spend, so that time spent on one thing is time not spent on another thing. If you can spend money (or maybe earn less money) to avoid spending time doing things that are uninteresting, boring or unproductive, you are allowing yourself to spend more time on things that are interesting, fun or productive.