6 ms·

VSCode is a poor example. Its a fully featured IDE, and sure it would be lighter without electron, but it still wouldn't be a lightweight piece of software. I u

VSCode is a poor example. Its a fully featured IDE, and sure it would be lighter without electron, but it still wouldn't be a lightweight piece of software. I use JetBrains which is not Electron, but also uses it's fair share of ram.

danmur 6y ago
I haven't compared ram usage but vscode feels (subjectively obviously) very slow by comparison to me. Intellij is a beast of an application in terms of features also.
pjmlp 6y ago
Nope is a very quite good example, because one can compare it to Emacs, vim, Sublime Text loaded with a similar set of plugins. And it isn't an IDE, rather a programmer's text editor.
- gumby 6y ago
  For decades people complained that Emacs was huge, bloated, etc. Now there are bigger web pages
  - pjmlp 6y ago
    Except I don't need an application in 2020 hardware to replicate my Emacs experience in 1995 hardware, with hardly any improvement worth mentioning.
    - gumby 6y ago
      It seems a bit unfair if your computing environment is faster than an 0.0125 MIPS KA-10 though doesn’t it?
  - peatmoss 6y ago
    “Eight Megabytes And Constantly Swapping” must be an alien sentiment to so many younger techies.
    - bitwize 6y ago
      Emacs is an alien phenomenon to younger techies. Who would use an editor that's older than their dad?
      - Silhouette 6y ago
        There are two kinds of fools. One says, "This is old, therefore it is good"; the other says, "This is new, therefore it is better." William Ralph Inge wrote that in 1931, but it has never been more true than when applied to modern technologies today.
      - anthk 6y ago
        They are using an Unix descendant probably as old as his grandpa in their pockets. TTY's date back to the Victorian era. AUX cables date back to the XIX century, too. Most silverware design at home date back to 1800-1900.
- deviantfero 6y ago
  I use emacs exclusively but VScode is way snappier when dealing with JSX syntax at least
nbrempel 6y ago
To be fair, JetBrains runs on the JVM which arguably has the same problems.
- vips7L 6y ago
  I wonder if forcing IntelliJ to run with ZGC would help since it releases unused memory back to the OS after some time. I did this with the Eclipse Language server and my memory usage cut in half on the same project.
- emodendroket 6y ago
  Yeah but if it didn't, would I be able to run it with no differences on Linux, OS X, and Windows?
  - leadingthenet 6y ago
    But maybe you shouldn’t be able to run it with no differences on Linux, macOS, and Windows.
    - emodendroket 6y ago
      Well... why not, exactly? I have work to do on all three, as do many others, and it seems like a win both for me and Jetbrains for that not to matter.
      - leadingthenet 6y ago
        Because the platform conventions are different. Think of it this way: if you have a system full of apps that conform to platform conventions, then you only need to learn the platform conventions and you’re suddenly more or less an expert in every new app you encounter. If you need to learn every. single. apps. stupid rules and UI all over again, then sure, you can transfer skills in that one app over to another platform, but that’s it. You want an email app? Good luck learning every keyboard shortcut and ridiculous UI decision all over again. Let’s just say this paradigm shift has not been driven by people with OCD (or good taste, for that matter).
jarjoura 6y ago
Most of the core functionality of VSCode is powered by native extensions written in C++. It's essentially only using HTML and JS as the UI engine.
- Tyriar 6y ago
  This is false. A very small amount of the core functionality of vscode is powered by native code, for example: find in files shells out to ripgrep, the majority of the other usages are mainly just exposing various native apis to js (like ptys, fast process trees, windows specific apis not surfaced by electron, etc.). The regex engine used for parsing textmate grammars is a special case that uses wasm.
bitwize 6y ago
Visual Studio -- itself a fully featured IDE, even back in the early 2000s -- used to run on machines with less than 1 GiB of RAM.
- qayxc 6y ago
  It also didn't support as many languages/features and was super slow on contemporary hardware. Even my 9 year old laptop can run VSCode just as fast as my 3 year old main machine. Back in 1998 when Visual Studio 6.0 (actually just the second publicly released version) was released, it took ages to load and used up quite some RAM. 6 years later, when I switched to VS.NET 2003, VS6 ran super fast on my PC. The difference was, however, that my 1998 PC was a 300MHz Pentium II with 64MB of RAM, wheras my 2003 machine was a n overclocked AMD Athlon XP at more than 2500MHz with 2GB of RAM. Now compare that with my 2011 laptop vs. my 2017 laptop: my 2011 machine has a dual core 2.5GHz CPU with 8GB of RAM. My 2017 laptop is a dual core 3.5GHz CPU with 16GB of RAM. 22 years ago, 5 years of progress meant a 10x increase in RAM and 8x increase in CPU speed. During the past 10 years we saw a doubling in RAM (barely, TBH) and maybe 1.5x in CPU speed (at the same core count). That's why the old software felt so fast - because we used it during a time when a major PC upgrade actually meant something. If you used a software package for five years, you could actually see more than a doubling in performance (e.g. Core2Duo E8600, 2008 vs Core i3-4350, 2013 [1]). That's just not the case anymore and skews our perception regarding performance heavily towards "lean" vintage apps. [1] https://www.techspot.com/article/1039-ten-years-intel-cpu-compared/page3.html https://www.techspot.com/article/1039-ten-years-intel-cpu-co...
  - berkut 6y ago
    I never remember Visual Studio 6 (VC++) being slow at all at the time on 1996-era hardware - quite the opposite (other than the dreaded "updating intellisense..." which would hang things for a while). I distinctly remember subsequent versions (.NET 2002, which I think had the UI re-written) being a lot slower than 6, and me still using version 6 when I could because of this. In fact, I can remember VS 6 opening in seconds, compared to later versions being much slower.
  - pjmlp 6y ago
ablekh 6y ago
In my opinion, VS Code is not a "fully featured IDE". In fact, I would argue that it is even not an IDE. Simply because, "I" ("Integrated") in IDE implies lack of external dependencies or, in other words, self-sufficiency. Install PyCharm, Rider or any other real IDE, for that matter, and you have a truly fully featured development environment (yes, you can install some optional plugins, but it is largely not needed). Install bare-bones (i.e., without any extensions) VS Code and you have just a nice development-focused editor, but definitely not an IDE.
- IggleSniggle 6y ago
  Interesting that you mention pycharm. VSCode has a superb integrated experience for TypeScript ootb with language, refactoring, IntelliSense support, etc, no plugins or additional language servers needed.
  - ablekh 6y ago
    Well, this is not terribly surprising, considering TypeScript's origins in Microsoft. Not adding full IDE support for their core languages (.NET) to VS Code is understandable as well, though - the company does not want to jeopardize sales of Visual Studio, their commercial true IDE. In any case, you could argue that VC Code has IDE-level functionality for TypeScript, but I still stand by my general argument.
twodave 6y ago
I like to joke/not really joke that (insert JetBrains product)’s main feature is converting laptop battery charge into heat and fan noise ;)
bdcravens 6y ago
Around 1997 I was able to carry around a copy of Homesite on a floppy and run it in many places, on machines in the neighborhood of 32MB of RAM. It understood multiple languages, you could define additional ones and your own tag fillers using a custom XML syntax, connect to a database to inspect schemas, etc. Not as full featured as VSCode, but it had an amazing amount of functionality.

danmur 6y ago

I haven't compared ram usage but vscode feels (subjectively obviously) very slow by comparison to me. Intellij is a beast of an application in terms of features also.

pjmlp 6y ago

Nope is a very quite good example, because one can compare it to Emacs, vim, Sublime Text loaded with a similar set of plugins. And it isn't an IDE, rather a programmer's text editor.

gumby 6y ago
For decades people complained that Emacs was huge, bloated, etc. Now there are bigger web pages
- pjmlp 6y ago
  Except I don't need an application in 2020 hardware to replicate my Emacs experience in 1995 hardware, with hardly any improvement worth mentioning.
  - gumby 6y ago
    It seems a bit unfair if your computing environment is faster than an 0.0125 MIPS KA-10 though doesn’t it?
- peatmoss 6y ago
  “Eight Megabytes And Constantly Swapping” must be an alien sentiment to so many younger techies.
  - bitwize 6y ago
    Emacs is an alien phenomenon to younger techies. Who would use an editor that's older than their dad?
    - Silhouette 6y ago
      There are two kinds of fools. One says, "This is old, therefore it is good"; the other says, "This is new, therefore it is better." William Ralph Inge wrote that in 1931, but it has never been more true than when applied to modern technologies today.
    - anthk 6y ago
      They are using an Unix descendant probably as old as his grandpa in their pockets. TTY's date back to the Victorian era. AUX cables date back to the XIX century, too. Most silverware design at home date back to 1800-1900.
deviantfero 6y ago
I use emacs exclusively but VScode is way snappier when dealing with JSX syntax at least

nbrempel 6y ago

To be fair, JetBrains runs on the JVM which arguably has the same problems.

vips7L 6y ago
I wonder if forcing IntelliJ to run with ZGC would help since it releases unused memory back to the OS after some time. I did this with the Eclipse Language server and my memory usage cut in half on the same project.
emodendroket 6y ago
Yeah but if it didn't, would I be able to run it with no differences on Linux, OS X, and Windows?
- leadingthenet 6y ago
  But maybe you shouldn’t be able to run it with no differences on Linux, macOS, and Windows.
  - emodendroket 6y ago
    Well... why not, exactly? I have work to do on all three, as do many others, and it seems like a win both for me and Jetbrains for that not to matter.
    - leadingthenet 6y ago
      Because the platform conventions are different. Think of it this way: if you have a system full of apps that conform to platform conventions, then you only need to learn the platform conventions and you’re suddenly more or less an expert in every new app you encounter. If you need to learn every. single. apps. stupid rules and UI all over again, then sure, you can transfer skills in that one app over to another platform, but that’s it. You want an email app? Good luck learning every keyboard shortcut and ridiculous UI decision all over again. Let’s just say this paradigm shift has not been driven by people with OCD (or good taste, for that matter).

jarjoura 6y ago

Most of the core functionality of VSCode is powered by native extensions written in C++. It's essentially only using HTML and JS as the UI engine.

Tyriar 6y ago
This is false. A very small amount of the core functionality of vscode is powered by native code, for example: find in files shells out to ripgrep, the majority of the other usages are mainly just exposing various native apis to js (like ptys, fast process trees, windows specific apis not surfaced by electron, etc.). The regex engine used for parsing textmate grammars is a special case that uses wasm.

bitwize 6y ago

Visual Studio -- itself a fully featured IDE, even back in the early 2000s -- used to run on machines with less than 1 GiB of RAM.

qayxc 6y ago
It also didn't support as many languages/features and was super slow on contemporary hardware. Even my 9 year old laptop can run VSCode just as fast as my 3 year old main machine. Back in 1998 when Visual Studio 6.0 (actually just the second publicly released version) was released, it took ages to load and used up quite some RAM. 6 years later, when I switched to VS.NET 2003, VS6 ran super fast on my PC. The difference was, however, that my 1998 PC was a 300MHz Pentium II with 64MB of RAM, wheras my 2003 machine was a n overclocked AMD Athlon XP at more than 2500MHz with 2GB of RAM. Now compare that with my 2011 laptop vs. my 2017 laptop: my 2011 machine has a dual core 2.5GHz CPU with 8GB of RAM. My 2017 laptop is a dual core 3.5GHz CPU with 16GB of RAM. 22 years ago, 5 years of progress meant a 10x increase in RAM and 8x increase in CPU speed. During the past 10 years we saw a doubling in RAM (barely, TBH) and maybe 1.5x in CPU speed (at the same core count). That's why the old software felt so fast - because we used it during a time when a major PC upgrade actually meant something. If you used a software package for five years, you could actually see more than a doubling in performance (e.g. Core2Duo E8600, 2008 vs Core i3-4350, 2013 [1]). That's just not the case anymore and skews our perception regarding performance heavily towards "lean" vintage apps. [1] https://www.techspot.com/article/1039-ten-years-intel-cpu-compared/page3.html https://www.techspot.com/article/1039-ten-years-intel-cpu-co...
- berkut 6y ago
  I never remember Visual Studio 6 (VC++) being slow at all at the time on 1996-era hardware - quite the opposite (other than the dreaded "updating intellisense..." which would hang things for a while). I distinctly remember subsequent versions (.NET 2002, which I think had the UI re-written) being a lot slower than 6, and me still using version 6 when I could because of this. In fact, I can remember VS 6 opening in seconds, compared to later versions being much slower.
- pjmlp 6y ago

ablekh 6y ago

In my opinion, VS Code is not a "fully featured IDE". In fact, I would argue that it is even not an IDE. Simply because, "I" ("Integrated") in IDE implies lack of external dependencies or, in other words, self-sufficiency. Install PyCharm, Rider or any other real IDE, for that matter, and you have a truly fully featured development environment (yes, you can install some optional plugins, but it is largely not needed). Install bare-bones (i.e., without any extensions) VS Code and you have just a nice development-focused editor, but definitely not an IDE.

IggleSniggle 6y ago
Interesting that you mention pycharm. VSCode has a superb integrated experience for TypeScript ootb with language, refactoring, IntelliSense support, etc, no plugins or additional language servers needed.
- ablekh 6y ago
  Well, this is not terribly surprising, considering TypeScript's origins in Microsoft. Not adding full IDE support for their core languages (.NET) to VS Code is understandable as well, though - the company does not want to jeopardize sales of Visual Studio, their commercial true IDE. In any case, you could argue that VC Code has IDE-level functionality for TypeScript, but I still stand by my general argument.

twodave 6y ago

I like to joke/not really joke that (insert JetBrains product)’s main feature is converting laptop battery charge into heat and fan noise ;)

bdcravens 6y ago

Around 1997 I was able to carry around a copy of Homesite on a floppy and run it in many places, on machines in the neighborhood of 32MB of RAM. It understood multiple languages, you could define additional ones and your own tag fillers using a custom XML syntax, connect to a database to inspect schemas, etc. Not as full featured as VSCode, but it had an amazing amount of functionality.