5 ms·

VS Code uses Electron and I can't say I've noticed any performance problems with it - indeed it is quite a bit faster for me than its native-code relative Visua

VS Code uses Electron and I can't say I've noticed any performance problems with it - indeed it is quite a bit faster for me than its native-code relative Visual Studio. So responsive Electron apps are certainly possible.

baybal2 6y ago
Vs code is an antiexample here. The whole point for then from the start was to not to repeat the Atom fiasco. The entirety of the project was running around of making Webkit not suck. They spent ennormous effort on that.
- e_proxus 6y ago
  That being said, I immediately notice when switching from Sublime to VS Code. It’s something in the key presses... I think it’s only noticeable if you’ve used a native application for a while. It’s not enough to go from VSC to Sublime and back to VSC again for five minutes. Make an effort to use a native app for a week or a month and then switch back.
  - disgruntledphd2 6y ago
    I noticed this a bunch when I moved from emacs to Jupyter notebook. Emacs will sometimes become slower (especially remote emacs), but it will always buffer your keypresses and do them in the correct order. Jupyter (for whatever reason), doesn't do this with the result that I ended up wanting to create a new code block, but that keypress got lost and then i end up ruining my original code block. I 100% noticed the difference, and it was super frustrating (fortunately I left that job, and have managed to avoid Jupyter in the new gig).
    - pdimitar 6y ago
      I am using Spacemacs and have spent days trying to make it work faster (I am on macOS). Took a while and some effort but with a few strange tweaks I managed to make it more responsive. Emacs/Spacemacs can still be weirdly slow sometimes but UI responsiveness is generally miles ahead of all Electron-based software still. Which makes it even funnier. Emacs is decades old and still uses quite a few ancient techniques that are only hampering it. Even with that, it's still so much better in terms of speed! Funny.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
- schmorptron 6y ago
  Wait, what is the atom fiasco?
  - foldr 6y ago
    Atom (https://atom.io/ https://atom.io/) is another Electron-based text editor release by GitHub (before it was acquired by Microsoft). I think it predated VSCode. It certainly had more mindshare in the early days. But whereas VSCode has always been quite snappy, Atom acquired a reputation for poor performance.
    - zwirbl 6y ago
      Pretty much like that, I tried Atom once (when I found platform.io and wanted to have a look) and it was just wild how slow it felt. On the upside, it made using those crappy Eclipse forks MCU manufacturers release (like CCC, Dave, etc.) fell a lot less painful
    - Rapzid 6y ago
      > another Electron-based text editor Well electron used to be called "atom shell" :)
      - foldr 6y ago
        Ah good point. I didn't know that.
    - WorldMaker 6y ago
      > I think it predated VSCode Yes, and no. They have a really interesting tale of convergent evolution. Atom was the original Electron app (as pointed out Electron was even originally named "atom-shell"), so it predates VSCode as an Electron app. But the extremely performant "Monaco code editor" that VSCode was built on top of (that forms the heart of VSCode) was started at Microsoft years before to be a code editor in parts of the Azure Portal, and also it was the code editor in IE/Edge dev tools from as far back as IE 9 or 10 I think it was (up until the Chromium Edge). It wasn't packaged into an Electron app until after Atom, but it has an interesting heritage that predates Atom and was built for some of the same reasons that GitHub wanted to build Atom. (ETA: Monaco's experience especially in IE Dev Tools and the wild west of minified JS dumps it had to work with from day one in that environment is where a lot of its performance came from that led VSCode to jumping Atom on performance out of the gate.)
tonyedgecombe 6y ago
VS Code has a lot of native code and VS is particularly bloated. I'm not sure this is a good comparison.
- sime2009 6y ago
  VS Code has very little native code outside Electron itself.
  - WorldMaker 6y ago
    Depends on which languages you work with. Many language servers are written in their own languages so it is possible to work with a lot of native code when using VS Code day to day even if most of VS Code itself isn't native code. VS Code also used to have far more native code earlier on in its development life, but seems to be transitioning a lot of it to WASM (paralleling the Node ecosystem as a whole moving a lot of performance heavy stuff from native NAPI plugins to WASM boxes; as one example: the major source maps support library moved from JS native to Rust to WASM compiled from Rust, IIRC).
robenkleene 6y ago
I'm very interested in the general perception of VS Code being fast, because for me it's slow enough that it's the main reason I use other editors. Here are a couple of examples: 1. It takes nine times as long as Vim to open a minified JavaScript file, and then format it with Prettier: https://twitter.com/robenkleene/status/1285631026648276993 https://twitter.com/robenkleene/status/1285631026648276993 2. It takes 14 times as long to open an empty text file than BBEdit: https://twitter.com/robenkleene/status/1257724392458661889 https://twitter.com/robenkleene/status/1257724392458661889 Both of the above examples revolve around opening files for the first time, and I suspect a lot of the slowness I perceive is because I open a lot of different projects and source code files when I'm working, and this is a bad use of VS Code. In practice, VS Code behaves more like a multi-language IDE than a text editor. Slow startup times are generally acceptable in IDEs because you're exchanging speed for power. A programmer should ideally be proficient in both an IDE and a text editor, because they're tools applicable to different problems. E.g., VS Code is a terrible choice for things like analyzing log output, formatting large files, testing isolated snippets of code, or working on source code files that aren't part of the same project. I find this to be a shame because VS Code is flexible enough that it would otherwise be excellent for all of these tasks if it were just more performant for some operations that it struggles with now.
- arethuza 6y ago
  Out of interest do you mean starting a new instance of VS Code for those things or using an existing one. I would agree that VS Code isn't the fastest thing when the editor is starting up, though I find it fine when started. I pretty much always have VS Code running so I don't find this a problem.
  - robenkleene 6y ago
    VS Code is already running in both examples. A lot of the overhead seems to come from making a new window (even though the app itself is already running), although notably most of the time spent in the Prettier example seems to be spent syntax highlighting the JavaScript. If you want to try a direct comparison of opening a file vs. a window, you can see the difference between opening a new file in an existing window (on Mac, `⌘N` / `File > New File`) or new window (on Mac, `⌥⌘N` / `File > New Window`). For me the latter is far slower than the former.

baybal2 6y ago

Vs code is an antiexample here. The whole point for then from the start was to not to repeat the Atom fiasco. The entirety of the project was running around of making Webkit not suck. They spent ennormous effort on that.

e_proxus 6y ago
That being said, I immediately notice when switching from Sublime to VS Code. It’s something in the key presses... I think it’s only noticeable if you’ve used a native application for a while. It’s not enough to go from VSC to Sublime and back to VSC again for five minutes. Make an effort to use a native app for a week or a month and then switch back.
- disgruntledphd2 6y ago
  I noticed this a bunch when I moved from emacs to Jupyter notebook. Emacs will sometimes become slower (especially remote emacs), but it will always buffer your keypresses and do them in the correct order. Jupyter (for whatever reason), doesn't do this with the result that I ended up wanting to create a new code block, but that keypress got lost and then i end up ruining my original code block. I 100% noticed the difference, and it was super frustrating (fortunately I left that job, and have managed to avoid Jupyter in the new gig).
  - pdimitar 6y ago
    I am using Spacemacs and have spent days trying to make it work faster (I am on macOS). Took a while and some effort but with a few strange tweaks I managed to make it more responsive. Emacs/Spacemacs can still be weirdly slow sometimes but UI responsiveness is generally miles ahead of all Electron-based software still. Which makes it even funnier. Emacs is decades old and still uses quite a few ancient techniques that are only hampering it. Even with that, it's still so much better in terms of speed! Funny.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
schmorptron 6y ago
Wait, what is the atom fiasco?
- foldr 6y ago
  Atom (https://atom.io/ https://atom.io/) is another Electron-based text editor release by GitHub (before it was acquired by Microsoft). I think it predated VSCode. It certainly had more mindshare in the early days. But whereas VSCode has always been quite snappy, Atom acquired a reputation for poor performance.
  - zwirbl 6y ago
    Pretty much like that, I tried Atom once (when I found platform.io and wanted to have a look) and it was just wild how slow it felt. On the upside, it made using those crappy Eclipse forks MCU manufacturers release (like CCC, Dave, etc.) fell a lot less painful
  - Rapzid 6y ago
    > another Electron-based text editor Well electron used to be called "atom shell" :)
    - foldr 6y ago
      Ah good point. I didn't know that.
  - WorldMaker 6y ago
    > I think it predated VSCode Yes, and no. They have a really interesting tale of convergent evolution. Atom was the original Electron app (as pointed out Electron was even originally named "atom-shell"), so it predates VSCode as an Electron app. But the extremely performant "Monaco code editor" that VSCode was built on top of (that forms the heart of VSCode) was started at Microsoft years before to be a code editor in parts of the Azure Portal, and also it was the code editor in IE/Edge dev tools from as far back as IE 9 or 10 I think it was (up until the Chromium Edge). It wasn't packaged into an Electron app until after Atom, but it has an interesting heritage that predates Atom and was built for some of the same reasons that GitHub wanted to build Atom. (ETA: Monaco's experience especially in IE Dev Tools and the wild west of minified JS dumps it had to work with from day one in that environment is where a lot of its performance came from that led VSCode to jumping Atom on performance out of the gate.)

tonyedgecombe 6y ago

VS Code has a lot of native code and VS is particularly bloated. I'm not sure this is a good comparison.

sime2009 6y ago
VS Code has very little native code outside Electron itself.
- WorldMaker 6y ago
  Depends on which languages you work with. Many language servers are written in their own languages so it is possible to work with a lot of native code when using VS Code day to day even if most of VS Code itself isn't native code. VS Code also used to have far more native code earlier on in its development life, but seems to be transitioning a lot of it to WASM (paralleling the Node ecosystem as a whole moving a lot of performance heavy stuff from native NAPI plugins to WASM boxes; as one example: the major source maps support library moved from JS native to Rust to WASM compiled from Rust, IIRC).

robenkleene 6y ago

I'm very interested in the general perception of VS Code being fast, because for me it's slow enough that it's the main reason I use other editors. Here are a couple of examples: 1. It takes nine times as long as Vim to open a minified JavaScript file, and then format it with Prettier: https://twitter.com/robenkleene/status/1285631026648276993 https://twitter.com/robenkleene/status/1285631026648276993 2. It takes 14 times as long to open an empty text file than BBEdit: https://twitter.com/robenkleene/status/1257724392458661889 https://twitter.com/robenkleene/status/1257724392458661889 Both of the above examples revolve around opening files for the first time, and I suspect a lot of the slowness I perceive is because I open a lot of different projects and source code files when I'm working, and this is a bad use of VS Code. In practice, VS Code behaves more like a multi-language IDE than a text editor. Slow startup times are generally acceptable in IDEs because you're exchanging speed for power. A programmer should ideally be proficient in both an IDE and a text editor, because they're tools applicable to different problems. E.g., VS Code is a terrible choice for things like analyzing log output, formatting large files, testing isolated snippets of code, or working on source code files that aren't part of the same project. I find this to be a shame because VS Code is flexible enough that it would otherwise be excellent for all of these tasks if it were just more performant for some operations that it struggles with now.

arethuza 6y ago
Out of interest do you mean starting a new instance of VS Code for those things or using an existing one. I would agree that VS Code isn't the fastest thing when the editor is starting up, though I find it fine when started. I pretty much always have VS Code running so I don't find this a problem.
- robenkleene 6y ago
  VS Code is already running in both examples. A lot of the overhead seems to come from making a new window (even though the app itself is already running), although notably most of the time spent in the Prettier example seems to be spent syntax highlighting the JavaScript. If you want to try a direct comparison of opening a file vs. a window, you can see the difference between opening a new file in an existing window (on Mac, `⌘N` / `File > New File`) or new window (on Mac, `⌥⌘N` / `File > New Window`). For me the latter is far slower than the former.