Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by byearthithatius 725 days ago
A LOT of apps use JavaScript, even performance critical ones. VSCode the most popular IDE in the entire world is JS running w/ Electron.
2 comments

It's a wrong comparison. A high-level language is usually good enough for a desktop app because there's not much ongoing computation happening. It's only input processing and small, infrequent updates to the view in response to the input (not to mention rendering of the DOM and low level input processing is done by the browser's C++ compiled code). A video game on the other hand has to do computations all the time at a very high frequency.
> VSCode the most popular IDE in the entire world is JS running w/ Electron

Node.js is fine on the server and JS is my preferred language. That said I switched from VSCode to vim a few years back because my laptop couldn't handle all the Electron apps I had running. Now the only browser instance I run is the actual browser and I'll never go back to Electron apps.

Similar story here. After using VSCode as my daily driver for 2 months (during which I never once touched Emacs) I switched back to Emacs because VSCode's responses to my keystrokes felt mushier and because I like to use dinky little mini PCs with no fans (because I'm much more easily annoyed by fan noises than most people and I prefer not to become bound to using Macs).