[sunnyps]

> Despite attempts to make Atom—an Electron application—more responsive, it never reached the performance standards the team yearned for.

This feels like an attempt at deflecting blame. VSCode is another Electron application that ended up having better performance than Atom. There's another Electron adjacent application that has good performance, the one you're probably using right now to read this page.

Depending on page content of course

[Shorel]

Reading this static HTML page and executing several megabytes of JavaScript to read and edit short lines of text are fundamentally different tasks, even if the same program can perform both actions.

VSCode can pretend to be fast in my desktop, and I would not care because desktops today are computing monsters that rival supercomputers of the past, but Sublime Text is still much faster at any text editing task.

[valtism]

VSCode has good performance, especially for how feature complete it is, but it really has nothing on the boot speed of Zed

[roland35]

Boot speed is nice and all but in general I boot once and I'm done!

[TiredOfLife]

> VSCode is another Electron application that ended up having better performance than Atom

Atom was kinda like emacs. Extensions could do almost anything. VS Code has a limited api that extensions can use

[x0nr8]

I’m not saying that VSCode is the snappiest editor out there but for all its flaws it’s still the most responsive editor for my use case on moderately sized CUDA/HIP projects.

[kriops]

What are you saying here? It is true that VS Code is less bad in terms of responsiveness in comparison to Atom. Zed, however, is written in Rust (i.e., not Electron), and I would guess it is at least an order of magnitude more responsive than VS Code across every possible scenario.

Web technologies are an unrivaled technological marvel for what they are, but it is disingenuous to imply they represent anything near the peak of what we are capable of in the context of performance.

[IshKebab]

It depends. It definitely opens faster and the general UI seems a bit faster, but open a largish file (a few MB) and VSCode will easily out-perform Zed because it doesn't have that fancy CDRT thing.

In my experience VSCode is plenty fast. Use it with no extensions and you will have zero problems with performance (though memory use isn't great). The real problems come when you have extensions, especially because it's often impossible to attribute performance issues to them because they can often do a lot of work all in the same "extension host" process.

[bigstrat2003]

> you will have zero problems with performance (though memory use isn't great)

Memory use is a part of performance, though, so I definitely would say VS Code has serious performance issues. It's why I no longer use it, in fact. It's inexcusable for something to eat as much RAM as VS Code does.

[cantalopes]

If you use vscode on a platform with limited resources you will see that vscode is absolutely NOT fastand zed outperforms vscose long way. Extensions or not. And electron is a pleague that needs to pass from this world

[verdverm]

Why is Zed using a CRDT when I open a source file to edit code? Are they using it for more than their multiplayer stuff? (agentic stuff?)

[satvikpendem]

Based on this comment [0], they're building DeltaDB as a version control system which uses a CRDT, so I assume even in single player mode, the file will instantiate its own CRDT for fine grained tracking of changes.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45916196#45919739