9 ms·
I don't really want more features for Atom. I just want it to be faster. Right now it's incredibly sluggish compared to e.g. Sublime. Is there any hope on this
by wyager 11y ago
I don't really want more features for Atom. I just want it to be faster. Right now it's incredibly sluggish compared to e.g. Sublime. Is there any hope on this front, or are the performance issues intrinsic?
- giancarlostoro 11y agoI agree. If they could just focus on stability and performance until it's not longer an issue then I would not care about "new features" considering most plugins handle most of what you need anyway.
- sotojuan 11y agoVS Code is also a Chrome window disguised as an app but runs much better, so there's definitely things the Atom/Electron team can do.
- giancarlostoro 11y agoI used to think it was faster but for some reason on Linux Mint when I open small source files it just goes berserk and freezes up completely. No idea what would cause it.
- podgib 11y agoVS code runs on electron, so it's really just atom itself, not electron, that must be the bottleneck
- snarfy 11y agoThis is a great observation and gives me hope for all the other projects built on atom.
- sktrdie 11y agoIt's a browser so I doubt it. On the other hand you get lots of developers and fast feature development/bug fixing.
- melling 11y agoSublime is written in C++ while Atom is written in JavaScript. Atom is going to be slow by design. Emacs uses 'slow" elisp to implement major functionality, but the critical functionality is written in C. Perhaps that approach could be taken with Atom?
- vbit 11y agoJavascript runtimes these days are plenty fast. You can definitely have a snappy editor and in only rare cases might need C. The issue is probably reducing the browser overhead, i.e. rendering DOM updates and the memory weight of the entire browser stack, etc.
- SwellJoe 11y agoGiven that VSCode is fast on the same Electron core also written in JavaScript, I think it's a lazy approach to simply dismiss it as, "Must be JavaScript! Case closed!" And, there have been editors written in a variety of higher level languages for decades, many that are slower than JavaScript, that aren't (as) slow as Atom. There's more to it than language choice.
- Klathmon 11y agoI'm convinced it has something to do with the syntax highlighting. Disable that, and it runs flawlessly on 10+GB files. I looked into it a bit a few weeks ago but got distracted. It uses regex and many of the statements could be improved. Plus they use a fairly off the wall regex engine that has pretty poor performance but they use it because it supports every damn encoding under the sun. I think if that can be figured out, the only "sluggish" part left will be startup (which IMO is acceptable at this point, but improvements would always be welcome)
- elcritch 11y agoCheck this out: http://davidvgalbraith.com/how-i-fixed-atom/ http://davidvgalbraith.com/how-i-fixed-atom/
- mynameisvlad 11y ago
- 13years 11y agoIt has definitely gotten better and VS Code and Brackets both give hope it can still improve. Actually Brackets all file search is faster than sublime.
- timrpeterson 11y agoYea slowness is what led me back to Sublime. I tried for months, I really did.
- draw_down 11y agoThat is my problem as well. It's just like Sublime.... but slower.
- hacker_9 11y agoI see this comment every time an Atom post gets on HN. Are you sure it's not just your computer specs? If Atom continually makes the HN front page then many people must be using it just fine and like it? Personally I'm not sure why we need another text editor of all things, but hey its made in javascript which is hip at the moment.
- gareim 11y agoIt's not his specs. Sublime is just that much faster. It also doesn't slowly creep up in RAM usage unlike Atom.
- izacus 11y agoA quad core, 16GB RAM rMBP with SSD should really be able to run a text editor for a 500 line Python file without caret lagging behind typing :/ Sublime can do it easily, Atom still can't. Am I holding it wrong?
- pearle 11y agoNo, Atom is just slower. 16GB, 4790k with SSD.
- 13years 11y agoI don't have any lag. Do you have lag with a plain text file? Does this happen with default install no added plugins? I recently was editing a 10M log file with no lag. I've had problems sometimes with all these editors with occasional bad performing plugins.
- girvo 11y agoMy Atom on a 8Gb rMBP with an SSD handles it perfectly fine...
- acdha 11y agoThe reason it comes up so often is because it's very noticeable even on late-model systems with SSDs. Just as with Java-based IDEs, the previous target of these complaints, many people tolerate it anyway because they find the features balance out raw speed.
- ssebastianj 11y agoIs there any chance to use Rust or Go to develop an Atom package? Not for the entire codebase, just for the parts which might be a bottleneck.