5 ms·

Either you use Electron or you don't. VSCode is handling a lot of the heavier stuff in C++, but it's still an Electron app, with the sluggishness that comes wi

Either you use Electron or you don't. VSCode is handling a lot of the heavier stuff in C++, but it's still an Electron app, with the sluggishness that comes with it. Compared to things like nvim or sublime text 3, VSCode performance ranges from "meh" to "ugh". It's true that VSCode is somewhat usable (unlike Atom). However, it is not impressive, despite so much effort being put into its performance (including a vast amount of core code being written in C++). For this reason, I take VSCode as the perfect counter-argument to Electron: It shows you that the absolute best case is somewhere between poor and mediocre responsiveness with pretty high resource consumption for the task. (Anyone who finds VSCode to be snappy is either too used to the sluggishness of web, unfamiliar with how a responsive application feels, or has just thrown so much hardware at the problem that it ends up being decent.)

exdsq 7y ago
I’m the latter - a 12 core Ryzen 3900X means even Visual Studio itself feels snappy! Seriously though, VSCode isn’t bad. I use it on my Surface Pro (dual core i5) without any issues. It’s a nice app.
kup0 7y ago
I like VSCode but also agree. Once you've felt the speed of native, like Sublime Text 3, especially when opening and working with a lot of files at once, it's really hard to use anything else, IMHO That said, there are use cases for VSCode that don't really apply to ST3, etc
pjmlp 7y ago
The React Native team at Microsoft does occasional jabs at Electron performance (check their BUILD and IGNITE talks). I have this hope that they eventually will trigger VSCode's rewrite into React Native.
qppo 7y ago
I mean I use vs code daily and don't think it's any less "snappy" than a native app. Quite the opposite really, Chromium's rendering engine is faster than most native cross platform toolkits. The memory consumption doesn't bother me either or come anywhere close to bottlenecking me, because I'm a professional using professional hardware. Sublime is also pretty featureless compared to VSCode as well.
- ComputerGuru 7y ago
  It’s not slow, but it is not responsiveness. Electron has terrible input latency compared to native.
- arghwhat 7y ago
  > Chromium's rendering engine is faster than most native cross platform toolkits. Which toolkits are you referring to, and do you truly just mean the renderer, or the entire engine? Chromiums renderer is pretty fast. Not as fast as direct rendering like Sublime Text does, but for very complex scenes, it will beat Gtk and Qt. However, it's expensive to build scenegraphs for it (needed on every change), and partial updates are far more expensive than they need to be. The end result is that, for something like an editor, Gtk and Qt will beat Chromium for responsiveness by a large margin, despite having much less performant renderers for the time being. (You can get around some of these costs by using WebGL of course, but if you're doing manual rendering you have already thrown most of the reason for Electron out of the window, so why not do it natively where it will be even faster?) > The memory consumption doesn't bother me either or come anywhere close to bottlenecking me, because I'm a professional using professional hardware. This is an awful argument. That I have beefy workstation machines doesn't really matter when I'm usually mobile on a low-power laptop. The difference between using VSCode and sublime/vim is several hours of battery life, and the difference between a comfortable lap and a warm lap. This idiocy of "it's fine, there's enough resources" is why my colleagues expensive MacBook Pro's are hyperventilating 24/7, and it's a problem for poorer individuals that might not afford a powerful machine. > Sublime is also pretty featureless compared to VSCode as well. Matter of taste. Sublime Text still has a very long list of plugins, and certainly does everything I will ever need an editor to do. I see no reason to pay the penalty of Electron to get support for NyanCat cursor plugins. VSCode is also pretty featureless if you compare it to vim, and if we pull Emacs into the discussion, VSCode ends up looking more like nano/Notepad.
  - qppo 7y ago
    Its too early in the morning for me to get into a flamewar about this. So all I'll say is that I get a lot of value out of VS Code as a tool, and I don't think it's slow. I think every point you bring up comes from a lack of experience and knowledge of the tool/platform, and it's not worth arguing about online.

exdsq 7y ago

I’m the latter - a 12 core Ryzen 3900X means even Visual Studio itself feels snappy! Seriously though, VSCode isn’t bad. I use it on my Surface Pro (dual core i5) without any issues. It’s a nice app.

kup0 7y ago

I like VSCode but also agree. Once you've felt the speed of native, like Sublime Text 3, especially when opening and working with a lot of files at once, it's really hard to use anything else, IMHO That said, there are use cases for VSCode that don't really apply to ST3, etc

pjmlp 7y ago

The React Native team at Microsoft does occasional jabs at Electron performance (check their BUILD and IGNITE talks). I have this hope that they eventually will trigger VSCode's rewrite into React Native.

qppo 7y ago

I mean I use vs code daily and don't think it's any less "snappy" than a native app. Quite the opposite really, Chromium's rendering engine is faster than most native cross platform toolkits. The memory consumption doesn't bother me either or come anywhere close to bottlenecking me, because I'm a professional using professional hardware. Sublime is also pretty featureless compared to VSCode as well.

ComputerGuru 7y ago
It’s not slow, but it is not responsiveness. Electron has terrible input latency compared to native.
arghwhat 7y ago
> Chromium's rendering engine is faster than most native cross platform toolkits. Which toolkits are you referring to, and do you truly just mean the renderer, or the entire engine? Chromiums renderer is pretty fast. Not as fast as direct rendering like Sublime Text does, but for very complex scenes, it will beat Gtk and Qt. However, it's expensive to build scenegraphs for it (needed on every change), and partial updates are far more expensive than they need to be. The end result is that, for something like an editor, Gtk and Qt will beat Chromium for responsiveness by a large margin, despite having much less performant renderers for the time being. (You can get around some of these costs by using WebGL of course, but if you're doing manual rendering you have already thrown most of the reason for Electron out of the window, so why not do it natively where it will be even faster?) > The memory consumption doesn't bother me either or come anywhere close to bottlenecking me, because I'm a professional using professional hardware. This is an awful argument. That I have beefy workstation machines doesn't really matter when I'm usually mobile on a low-power laptop. The difference between using VSCode and sublime/vim is several hours of battery life, and the difference between a comfortable lap and a warm lap. This idiocy of "it's fine, there's enough resources" is why my colleagues expensive MacBook Pro's are hyperventilating 24/7, and it's a problem for poorer individuals that might not afford a powerful machine. > Sublime is also pretty featureless compared to VSCode as well. Matter of taste. Sublime Text still has a very long list of plugins, and certainly does everything I will ever need an editor to do. I see no reason to pay the penalty of Electron to get support for NyanCat cursor plugins. VSCode is also pretty featureless if you compare it to vim, and if we pull Emacs into the discussion, VSCode ends up looking more like nano/Notepad.
- qppo 7y ago
  Its too early in the morning for me to get into a flamewar about this. So all I'll say is that I get a lot of value out of VS Code as a tool, and I don't think it's slow. I think every point you bring up comes from a lack of experience and knowledge of the tool/platform, and it's not worth arguing about online.