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VSCode is based on Electron, a glorified hack/resource hog of Chromium than even Github largely abandoned. It maybe "great" and mildly "popular" here and there,

VSCode is based on Electron, a glorified hack/resource hog of Chromium than even Github largely abandoned. It maybe "great" and mildly "popular" here and there, but it's built on a foundation of mud. Build native apps that work and are performant. With enough effort and care, a frictionless experience can be made with a TUI should some "Jetbrains" come along and try to make a commercial product out of it.

nkzd 4y ago
Mildly "popular"? Which editor is more popular than VSCode?
- smolder 4y ago
  By number of installs, maybe vim :)
  - latency-guy2 4y ago
    If we go by this page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_operating_systems https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_operating_syste... Then it has to be Windows Notepad. Android does not have a default text editor, if it did then I'd agree.
  - jasonm23 4y ago
    ed
- pm3003 4y ago
  Notepad++?
  - ctvo 4y ago
    The Windows only text editor is more popular than VSCode?
marmada 4y ago
This is the most "just use rsync instead of Dropbox" HN-style argument I've ever heard. It's sufficiently comical to be satire
- loup-vaillant 4y ago
  Yet I’m seriously considering moving away from Emacs solely because it does not boot instantly. Sure I could set up an Emacs server and all that, but come on: it’s a text editor. It should not take more than 200 milliseconds to boot on a modern machine. If I care about that, I’ll probably care about Electron using hundreds of megabytes of RAM I shouldn’t even have to buy in the first place. It’s thinking like this that make people say sad things like "16GB of RAM is a bit tight nowadays, maybe you should go up to 32". (Edit: to people who think buying a bit more RAM is no big deal: remember that our resources are finite, that computers are one of the most polluting industries out there, and the climate clock is ticking.)
  - pizza234 4y ago
    I've done some tests some time ago, and Sublime Text, which is a native app, also takes a lot of memory. Plugins also do take lots of memory. JetBrain's IDEs are extremely slow and memory intensive - well beyond VSC and ST - and yet, complaints are always directed at VSC. I like to be able to edit new text files instantly, and the simple, pragmatic solution, is to keep an editor always open in the background.
  - mpeg 4y ago
    I understand your point, but I can’t say I relate at all. I start my code editor maybe once or twice a day, so the launch speed does not even register RAM and computers in general are so cheap that I just max out every laptop configuration I buy. If you’re a programmer and will use a machine for work spending $3-4k every couple years should not be a problem, we’re paid very well and should therefore use the best tools we can find.
    - loup-vaillant 4y ago
      > I start my code editor maybe once or twice a day I start my main editor (with the shortcuts I like and all) every time I write (or edit) a commit message. And back when I used Mutt, every time I wrote an email as well. (Now I’m using Thunderbird, but I did like the ability to use my preferred text editor everywhere.) RAM is cheap at the individual level. But if the entire world needs to go from 16GB to 32GB or whatever, the sheer volume of the resulting electronic waste does not exactly increase my faith in humanity.
koonsolo 4y ago
Maybe there is an editor out there for you that was developed in pure machine-code.
mpeg 4y ago
I agree that electron apps are unnecessarily wasteful but if there’s something important enough to deserve the resources is a code editor. The underlying problem with Electron is that browsers are also massive resource hogs and I don’t see people switching to elinks anytime soon. Maybe I’m stuck in a cycle of consumerism - accepting slower software and buying faster hardware - but I value convenience a lot and in the grand scheme of things vscode using up like $5 worth of RAM is not enough to look for alternatives.
d_tr 4y ago
Why should I prefer a strict grid of characters based on technology from more than half a century ago to a GUI for something with the functionality of a tool such as VSCode or Sublime Text?
- d0mine 4y ago
  «it lists different values that each tool prioritizes, and how "Core values are self-reinforcing. They attract like-minded people, who will then defend them."» https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29159433 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29159433
- overtomanu 4y ago
  It is useful in corporate setting when you have to edit files over ssh on some random machine and you already have terminal open. VS code has remote option but you have to set it up and navigate again etc
- jasonm23 4y ago
  > "Technology from more than half a century ago" I think you are missing out the part where it's technology developed continuously for almost half a century. VSCode is very nice, but I quickly become frustrated by it's lag in comparison. It does beats the pants of every other GUI IDE out there, with JetBrains IDEs coming a significant second place. But Vim or Emacs with LSP are extremely capable IDEs and have unmatched speed compared to any GUI IDE you can name.
  - d_tr 4y ago
    > But Vim or Emacs with LSP are extremely capable IDEs and have unmatched speed compared to any GUI IDE you can name. I do not doubt that they are. I use Emacs with a simple config as the default editor to open files with, but I do not know elisp to set up something more feature-rich, and have not felt the need to yet, but I would like to try some day. It is a truly unique piece of software with lots of love put into it, and it is also GPL which I like. The problem is just that the defaults are painful and I want to know exactly what my elisp is doing, and this would take some work. Yes I know that Spacemacs and Doom Emacs exist. But my comment (the phrasing could be clearer) was about the choice of TUI vs GUI if one was to start creating a new IDE today, in response to the parent comment: > With enough effort and care, a frictionless experience can be made with a TUI should some "Jetbrains" come along and try to make a commercial product out of it. In such a case my preference would be to have a decoupled architecture which would allow for both. You can make such nice things with today's computing power and graphics cards, that it would be a shame to not take advantage of it. And the performance can be stellar. We are talking TFLOPS nowadays.
simonh 4y ago
>Build native apps that work and are performant. The ‘native’ there is redundant. The only thing that matters is if VSCode works well enough and is performant enough to be a viable option. Often native apps will win on the ‘works well enough’ criteria, due to superior OS integration and familiarity, but that isn’t a given. If you use multiple platforms then having a solid cross platform option also has advantages in that area.
robenkleene 4y ago
> It maybe "great" and mildly "popular" here and there VS Code is not just mildly popular, it's significantly more than twice as popular as any text editor has ever been in the modern era. Source, it's currently used by 74% of programmers (https://survey.stackoverflow.co/2022/#technology-most-popular-technologies https://survey.stackoverflow.co/2022/#technology-most-popula...), the next highest text editor, since the survey started in 2015, was Sublime Text in its prime (2016) at 31%. It's fair to call VS Code's popularity unprecedented and historic. And it's already being used to shape the future of the industry. E.g., we're watching the decline of local development right now (outside of specialized use cases) largely through VS Code's support for remote development features. This is most likely just beginning of how VS Code will leverage its position to shape the future of programming.
- pjmlp 4y ago
  Ironically the main architect is Eric Gamma from Eclipse fame.
- cxr 4y ago
  > it's currently used by 74% of programmers 74% of the respondents to the latest Stack Overflow survey, you mean.
rascul 4y ago
Github didn't abandon Electron. Github created Electron for their editor called Atom. Microsoft later used Electron for VS Code. Microsoft bought Github. Github is sunsetting Atom (not Electron) to focus on VS Code. https://github.blog/2022-06-08-sunsetting-atom/ https://github.blog/2022-06-08-sunsetting-atom/
osigurdson 4y ago
It will be interesting to see if Microsoft's Maui effort will be able to compete with Electron using a somewhat more native approach. I suspect that it will not.
- pier25 4y ago
  > I suspect that it will not. I agree. The reason Electron got popular is because front end devs can quickly build a desktop app for use cases where a web app will not work. And I say that as a web dev who has worked on probably a dozen apps with Electron. Mostly internal tools, but also stuff in production for end users. For the end user projects we ended up replacing Electron with native apps using the native web view. Each app had a tiny native layer for stuff like downloading files, etc. I don't remember the exact numbers but our macOS app went from +100MB to about 5MB download. Memory usage was also great reduced. The macOS app barely used something like 15MB of RAM IIRC. That was in 2018. Today there are projects that already do this. I think Maui will rather compete with Flutter and QT, not Electron.
  - pjmlp 4y ago
    It can via Blazor and WebWidgets, however I see that as a waste of development resources from the Blazor team.
- pjmlp 4y ago
  For that Electron users would need to learn C#...
stjohnswarts 4y ago
and yet millions of people use it every day just fine. It's not any more of a resource hog than emacs when you load up enough lsp's and add ons to make it useful and modern.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
alanek2007xD 4y ago
lol you probably never wrote a live of code in your proffesional life xD i've used Idea and it's shit and slow as fuck. VSCode works fast even on a laptop, with intellisense scanning code in background. Noob.

nkzd 4y ago

Mildly "popular"? Which editor is more popular than VSCode?

smolder 4y ago
By number of installs, maybe vim :)
- latency-guy2 4y ago
  If we go by this page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_operating_systems https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_operating_syste... Then it has to be Windows Notepad. Android does not have a default text editor, if it did then I'd agree.
- jasonm23 4y ago
  ed
pm3003 4y ago
Notepad++?
- ctvo 4y ago
  The Windows only text editor is more popular than VSCode?

marmada 4y ago

This is the most "just use rsync instead of Dropbox" HN-style argument I've ever heard. It's sufficiently comical to be satire

loup-vaillant 4y ago
Yet I’m seriously considering moving away from Emacs solely because it does not boot instantly. Sure I could set up an Emacs server and all that, but come on: it’s a text editor. It should not take more than 200 milliseconds to boot on a modern machine. If I care about that, I’ll probably care about Electron using hundreds of megabytes of RAM I shouldn’t even have to buy in the first place. It’s thinking like this that make people say sad things like "16GB of RAM is a bit tight nowadays, maybe you should go up to 32". (Edit: to people who think buying a bit more RAM is no big deal: remember that our resources are finite, that computers are one of the most polluting industries out there, and the climate clock is ticking.)
- pizza234 4y ago
  I've done some tests some time ago, and Sublime Text, which is a native app, also takes a lot of memory. Plugins also do take lots of memory. JetBrain's IDEs are extremely slow and memory intensive - well beyond VSC and ST - and yet, complaints are always directed at VSC. I like to be able to edit new text files instantly, and the simple, pragmatic solution, is to keep an editor always open in the background.
- mpeg 4y ago
  I understand your point, but I can’t say I relate at all. I start my code editor maybe once or twice a day, so the launch speed does not even register RAM and computers in general are so cheap that I just max out every laptop configuration I buy. If you’re a programmer and will use a machine for work spending $3-4k every couple years should not be a problem, we’re paid very well and should therefore use the best tools we can find.
  - loup-vaillant 4y ago
    > I start my code editor maybe once or twice a day I start my main editor (with the shortcuts I like and all) every time I write (or edit) a commit message. And back when I used Mutt, every time I wrote an email as well. (Now I’m using Thunderbird, but I did like the ability to use my preferred text editor everywhere.) RAM is cheap at the individual level. But if the entire world needs to go from 16GB to 32GB or whatever, the sheer volume of the resulting electronic waste does not exactly increase my faith in humanity.

koonsolo 4y ago

Maybe there is an editor out there for you that was developed in pure machine-code.

mpeg 4y ago

I agree that electron apps are unnecessarily wasteful but if there’s something important enough to deserve the resources is a code editor. The underlying problem with Electron is that browsers are also massive resource hogs and I don’t see people switching to elinks anytime soon. Maybe I’m stuck in a cycle of consumerism - accepting slower software and buying faster hardware - but I value convenience a lot and in the grand scheme of things vscode using up like $5 worth of RAM is not enough to look for alternatives.

d_tr 4y ago

Why should I prefer a strict grid of characters based on technology from more than half a century ago to a GUI for something with the functionality of a tool such as VSCode or Sublime Text?

d0mine 4y ago
«it lists different values that each tool prioritizes, and how "Core values are self-reinforcing. They attract like-minded people, who will then defend them."» https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29159433 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29159433
overtomanu 4y ago
It is useful in corporate setting when you have to edit files over ssh on some random machine and you already have terminal open. VS code has remote option but you have to set it up and navigate again etc
jasonm23 4y ago
> "Technology from more than half a century ago" I think you are missing out the part where it's technology developed continuously for almost half a century. VSCode is very nice, but I quickly become frustrated by it's lag in comparison. It does beats the pants of every other GUI IDE out there, with JetBrains IDEs coming a significant second place. But Vim or Emacs with LSP are extremely capable IDEs and have unmatched speed compared to any GUI IDE you can name.
- d_tr 4y ago
  > But Vim or Emacs with LSP are extremely capable IDEs and have unmatched speed compared to any GUI IDE you can name. I do not doubt that they are. I use Emacs with a simple config as the default editor to open files with, but I do not know elisp to set up something more feature-rich, and have not felt the need to yet, but I would like to try some day. It is a truly unique piece of software with lots of love put into it, and it is also GPL which I like. The problem is just that the defaults are painful and I want to know exactly what my elisp is doing, and this would take some work. Yes I know that Spacemacs and Doom Emacs exist. But my comment (the phrasing could be clearer) was about the choice of TUI vs GUI if one was to start creating a new IDE today, in response to the parent comment: > With enough effort and care, a frictionless experience can be made with a TUI should some "Jetbrains" come along and try to make a commercial product out of it. In such a case my preference would be to have a decoupled architecture which would allow for both. You can make such nice things with today's computing power and graphics cards, that it would be a shame to not take advantage of it. And the performance can be stellar. We are talking TFLOPS nowadays.

simonh 4y ago

>Build native apps that work and are performant. The ‘native’ there is redundant. The only thing that matters is if VSCode works well enough and is performant enough to be a viable option. Often native apps will win on the ‘works well enough’ criteria, due to superior OS integration and familiarity, but that isn’t a given. If you use multiple platforms then having a solid cross platform option also has advantages in that area.

robenkleene 4y ago

> It maybe "great" and mildly "popular" here and there VS Code is not just mildly popular, it's significantly more than twice as popular as any text editor has ever been in the modern era. Source, it's currently used by 74% of programmers (https://survey.stackoverflow.co/2022/#technology-most-popular-technologies https://survey.stackoverflow.co/2022/#technology-most-popula...), the next highest text editor, since the survey started in 2015, was Sublime Text in its prime (2016) at 31%. It's fair to call VS Code's popularity unprecedented and historic. And it's already being used to shape the future of the industry. E.g., we're watching the decline of local development right now (outside of specialized use cases) largely through VS Code's support for remote development features. This is most likely just beginning of how VS Code will leverage its position to shape the future of programming.

pjmlp 4y ago
Ironically the main architect is Eric Gamma from Eclipse fame.
cxr 4y ago
> it's currently used by 74% of programmers 74% of the respondents to the latest Stack Overflow survey, you mean.

rascul 4y ago

Github didn't abandon Electron. Github created Electron for their editor called Atom. Microsoft later used Electron for VS Code. Microsoft bought Github. Github is sunsetting Atom (not Electron) to focus on VS Code. https://github.blog/2022-06-08-sunsetting-atom/ https://github.blog/2022-06-08-sunsetting-atom/

osigurdson 4y ago

It will be interesting to see if Microsoft's Maui effort will be able to compete with Electron using a somewhat more native approach. I suspect that it will not.

pier25 4y ago
> I suspect that it will not. I agree. The reason Electron got popular is because front end devs can quickly build a desktop app for use cases where a web app will not work. And I say that as a web dev who has worked on probably a dozen apps with Electron. Mostly internal tools, but also stuff in production for end users. For the end user projects we ended up replacing Electron with native apps using the native web view. Each app had a tiny native layer for stuff like downloading files, etc. I don't remember the exact numbers but our macOS app went from +100MB to about 5MB download. Memory usage was also great reduced. The macOS app barely used something like 15MB of RAM IIRC. That was in 2018. Today there are projects that already do this. I think Maui will rather compete with Flutter and QT, not Electron.
- pjmlp 4y ago
  It can via Blazor and WebWidgets, however I see that as a waste of development resources from the Blazor team.
pjmlp 4y ago
For that Electron users would need to learn C#...

stjohnswarts 4y ago

and yet millions of people use it every day just fine. It's not any more of a resource hog than emacs when you load up enough lsp's and add ons to make it useful and modern.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

alanek2007xD 4y ago

lol you probably never wrote a live of code in your proffesional life xD i've used Idea and it's shit and slow as fuck. VSCode works fast even on a laptop, with intellisense scanning code in background. Noob.