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> but is based on a browser engine I see this critisism of VSCode a lot - but the job of a browser engine is to render text really fast! Rendering text is som

> but is based on a browser engine I see this critisism of VSCode a lot - but the job of a browser engine is to render text really fast! Rendering text is something you want to do in a text-editor is it not? Why not use the best tool for the job? You're probably right that something like Sublime Text is faster - but that's a massive undertaking that would take a lot of engineering to get right.

bananaface 6y ago
The job of a browser is to render a wide range of UI specifications reliably and support a collection of broken but grandfathered web languages, not to render them quickly. Speed is nice, but it comes after those concerns. The point of Electron is to allow people to develop UIs quickly, leveraging their experience with the web. Electron is extremely bloated & slow. To some degree it has to be. If browsers were about speed, they wouldn't interpret Javascript. I'd argue they'd probably force the UI to be specified in a form that explicitly disallows inefficiencies and probably isn't turing complete. I'd argue a domain-specific solution for rendering highlighted code specifically could be a lot faster than a browser, like multiple orders of magnitude. We know that's the case by virtue of the fact we could even do it at all in the 80s.