5 ms·

What's the point of perf comparison for editors totally not comparable feature-wise?

• crazygringo 10y ago
  What's the point of feature comparison for editors that aren't comparable perf-wise?
• wrsh07 10y ago
  Perf is a feature; so it seems like a comparison of a single (sometimes important) feature irrespective of the other features.
• deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
• SwellJoe 10y ago
  Features are intended to save time, right? So...is an infinitely featureful editor best, if it also takes infinite time to complete operations? I know this is an absurd extremity; just trying to make a point that features that end up taking longer to "do the thing" than a faster editor with fewer features could do the same thing, aren't providing greater utility than the less featured editor. Note, I'm not saying that the more featureful editors aren't worth the trade off in performance. Just that there is a point where it wouldn't be a good trade. I use both Atom and VS Code (trying to figure out which I like better) for my more complex projects (a lot of files/deps/etc) that I can test locally. But, fall back to vim for quick changes on single files and whenever I'm testing-editing-committing on a remote machine or VM. It's a feature that vim starts instantly, wherever I am. It's a feature that it's still fast(ish) even over a slow(ish) network. A killer features in this case...I can't use Atom or VS Code, at all, on a remote server over a slow link. Literally impossible to do. So, why not compare a bunch of different editors with wildly different capabilities, if it provides insight into the relative performance and sizes of the editors? And, to be fair, some of the fast/light editors are roughly as capable as VS Code, Atom, or Sublime. vim and Emacs are plenty powerful editors with huge ecosystems of additional functionality. I understand the appeal of a good GUI, and the bigger/slower editors do have superior UI to vim or emacs, but it's just one feature of many we can compare.
  • octref 10y ago
    Would you say it's fair to compare the memory usage / loading time of a huge TS file in VSCode vs in vanilla Vim, when one loads Language Services and provide advanced language features while the other just does Syntax Highlighting? Or comparing Vim against Sublime for loading large files, when Sublime needs to draw the very fine and useful minimap but Vim doesn't? In addition, most of these perf tests are extreme cases, whereas some editors are optimizing for more common use cases.
    • SwellJoe 10y ago
      I dunno what "Languages Services" is. I guess I don't need it? It doesn't have to be fair to be useful and interesting. Software doesn't have feelings, so we can judge it on all sorts of metrics, fair and otherwise, without causing harm. Performance is a feature I value. So are some of the other things the bigger slower editors do. Having real metrics about their relative differences is useful, IMHO.
      • jordache 10y ago
        intellisense in VSC for TS's typed codebase.
    • michaelmrose 10y ago
      What on earth is a minimap good for? There are lots of useful way to jump to a given file variable or definition