9 ms·

Does anyone have any anecdoctal evidence around the snappiness of VsCode with Apple Silicon? I very begrudgingly switched over from SublimeText this year (after

Does anyone have any anecdoctal evidence around the snappiness of VsCode with Apple Silicon? I very begrudgingly switched over from SublimeText this year (after using it as my daily driver for ~10yrs). I have a beefy 2018 MBP but VScode just drags. This is the only thing pushing me to upgrade my machine right now but I'd be bummed if there's still not a significant improvement with an m3 pro.

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
lawrjone 3y ago
If you're using an Intel Mac at this point, you should 100% upgrade. The performance of the MX chips blows away the Intel chips and there's almost no friction with the arm architecture at this point. I don't use VSCode but most of my team do and I frequently pair with them. Never noticed it to be anything other than very snappy. They all have M1s or up (I am the author of this post, so the detail about their hardware is in the link).
- hsbauauvhabzb 3y ago
  There can be plenty of friction depending on your use case.
  - grecy 3y ago
    It would be very helpful if you told us the use cases that have friction so we know if they apply to our use cases
  - hmottestad 3y ago
    What software are you worried about? Hackernews is a great place to share and hear if anyone has similar experiences or maybe managed to find a fix!
    - hsbauauvhabzb 3y ago
      Mostly x86 virtual machines for Linux and Windows. ARM ports of both platforms exist but don’t always meet use cases (binary apps, etc).
      - dev_tty01 3y ago
        You can run x86 binaries on ARM Linux VMs running on Apple Silicon machines. https://developer.apple.com/documentation/virtualization/running_intel_binaries_in_linux_vms_with_rosetta https://developer.apple.com/documentation/virtualization/run...
        hsbauauvhabzb 3y ago
        That doesn’t work well in all scenarios.
    - Tarball10 3y ago
      Kind of a edge case, but we were attempting to migrate from Docker to Podman, and found running x86 container images in Podman Desktop on M-series Macs to be unacceptably slow. Docker Desktop supports Rosetta 2 virtualization which performs fine, but Podman Desktop does not.
      - hmottestad 3y ago
        Podman Desktop is free and open source right? You could implement Rosetta 2 support, or maybe pay them to implement it for you? I shy away from x86 images too, even thought I use docker.
    - maerF0x0 3y ago
      PSA: Dont get a mac with apple silicon if you need/want Virtual Box https://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/Downloads https://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/Downloads
      - sgjohnson 3y ago
whalesalad 3y ago
I have 2x intel macbook pro's that are honestly paperweights. Apple Silicon is infinitely faster. It's a bummer because one of them is also a 2018 fully loaded and I would have a hard time even selling it to someone because of how much better the M2/M3 is. It's wild when I see people building hackintoshes on like a Thinkpad T480 ... its like riding a pennyfarthing bicycle versus a ducati. My M2 Air is my favorite laptop of all time. Keyboard is finally back to being epic (esp compared to 2018 era, which I had to replace myself and that was NOT fun). It has no fan so it never makes noise. I rarely plug it in for AC power. I can hack almost all day on it (using remote SSH vscode to my beefy workstation) without plugging in. The other night I worked for 4 hours straight refactoring a ton of vue components and it went from 100% battery to 91% battery.
- ghaff 3y ago
  That assumes you only use one laptop. I have a couple 2015 Macs that are very useful for browser tasks. They’re not paperweights and I use them daily.
  - whalesalad 3y ago
    I have a rack in my basement with a combined 96 cores and 192gb of ram (proxmox cluster), and a 13900k/64gb desktop workstation for most dev work. I usually will offload workloads to those before leveraging one of these old laptops that is usually dead battery. If I need something for "browser tasks" (I am interpreting this as cross-browser testing?) I have dedicated VMs for that. For just browsing the web, my M2 is still king as it has zero fan, makes no noise, and will last for days without charging if you are just browsing the web or writing documentation. I would rather have a ton of beefy compute that is remotely accessible and one single lightweight super portable laptop, personally. I should probably donate these mac laptops to someone who is less fortunate. I would love to do that, actually.
    - xp84 3y ago
      > should donate Indeed. I keep around a 2015 MBP with 16GB (asked my old job's IT if I could just keep it when I left since it had already been replaced and wouldn't ever be redeployed) to supplement my Mac Mini which is my personal main computer. I sometimes use screen sharing, but mostly when I use the 2015 it's just a web browsing task. With adblocking enabled, it's 100% up to the task even with a bunch of tabs. Given probably 80% of people probably use webapps for nearly everything, there's a huge amount of life left in a late-stage Intel Mac for people who will never engage in the types of tasks I used to find sluggish on my 2015 (very large Excel sheet calculations and various kinds of frontend code transpilation). Heck, even that stuff ran amazingly better on my 16" 2019 Intel MBP, so I'd assume for web browsing your old Macs will be amazing for someone in need, assuming they don't have bad keyboards.
fragmede 3y ago
Your 5 year old computer is, well, 5 years old. It was once beefy but that's technology for you.
orenlindsey 3y ago
VSCode works perfectly.
baq 3y ago
I've got a 12700k desktop with windows and an M1 macbook (not pro!) and my pandas notebooks run noticeably faster on the mac unless I'm able to max out all cores on the Intel chip (this is after, ahem, fixing the idiotic scheduler which would put the background python on E-cores.) I couldn't believe it. Absolutely get an apple silicon machine, no contest the best hardware on the market right now.
kimixa 3y ago
The 2018 macbook pros weren't even using the best silicon of the time - they were in the middle of Intel's "14nm skylake again" period, and an AMD GPU from 2016. I suspect one of the reasons why Apple silicon looks so good is the previous generations were at a dip of performance. Maybe they took the foot off the gas WRT updates as they knew the M series of chips was coming soon?
- doublepg23 3y ago
  My theory is Apple bought Intel's timeline as much as anyone and Intel just didn't deliver.
eyelidlessness 3y ago
On my 2019 MBP, I found VSCode performance poor enough to be annoying on a regular basis, enough so that I would frequently defer restarting it or my machine to avoid the lengthy interruption. Doing basically anything significant would have the fans running full blast pretty much constantly. On my M2 Max, all of that is ~fully resolved. There is still some slight lag, and I have to figure it’s just the Electron tax, but never enough to really bother me, certainly not enough to defer restarting anything. And I can count the times I’ve even heard the fans on one hand… and even so, never for more than a few seconds (though each time has been a little alarming, just because it’s now so rare).
aragonite 3y ago
It depends on what specifically you find slow about VSCode. In my experience, some aspects of VSCode feel less responsive than Sublime simply due to intentional design choices. For example, VSCode's goto files and project symbol search is definitely not as snappy as Sublime's. But this difference is due to VSCode's choice to use debouncing (search is triggered after typing has stopped) as opposed to throttling (restricts function execution to a set time interval).
tmpfile 3y ago
If you find your compiles are slow, I found a bug in vscode where builds would compile significantly faster when the status bar and panel are hidden. Compiles that took 20s would take 4s with those panels hidden. https://github.com/microsoft/vscode/issues/160118 https://github.com/microsoft/vscode/issues/160118
- hmottestad 3y ago
  That was a year ago! At this point someone will complain that it’s a feature they use to warm their cat. Not every day one sees a user report a 5x performance issue that seems so simple to reproduce.
  - lagadu 3y ago
    Obligatory relevant xkcd: https://xkcd.com/1172/ https://xkcd.com/1172/
mattgreenrocks 3y ago
VSCode is noticeably laggy on my 2019 MBP 16in to the point that I dislike using it. Discrete GPU helps, but it still feels dog slow.
firecall 3y ago
I’m a SublimeText die hard! I do regularly try VSCode to see what I’m missing. VS Code has great remote editing that I do use. However, on my M1 Pro 16”, VS Code is noticeable laggier than sublime Text! Just clicking on a file in the side bar and waiting for text to appear has lag. Many non-nerdy people might think it’s instant, but I can see the lag clearly! LOL For my tastes the VS Code UI is cluttered and generally feels slow. The extensions are great but also a nightmare of updates and alerts of things broken. If it’s your thing, you can use CoPilot in Sublime Text through a plugin that actually works really well! I’m on the fence about CoPilots benefits though. Sometimes I’ll flick over to VS Code to use the chat copilot if I need an answer for an API call etc…. If I had to stick with one, I’m sticking with Sublime Text.
balls187 3y ago
You have a 5-year old computer. I'm a professional and I make a living writing software. Investing ~4k every 3-4 years on fast computer is a no brainer to me.
Eric_WVGG 3y ago
give Panic’s Nova a look. “What if VSCode was a native app,” basically. I love it.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

lawrjone 3y ago

If you're using an Intel Mac at this point, you should 100% upgrade. The performance of the MX chips blows away the Intel chips and there's almost no friction with the arm architecture at this point. I don't use VSCode but most of my team do and I frequently pair with them. Never noticed it to be anything other than very snappy. They all have M1s or up (I am the author of this post, so the detail about their hardware is in the link).

hsbauauvhabzb 3y ago
There can be plenty of friction depending on your use case.
- grecy 3y ago
  It would be very helpful if you told us the use cases that have friction so we know if they apply to our use cases
- hmottestad 3y ago
  What software are you worried about? Hackernews is a great place to share and hear if anyone has similar experiences or maybe managed to find a fix!
  - hsbauauvhabzb 3y ago
    Mostly x86 virtual machines for Linux and Windows. ARM ports of both platforms exist but don’t always meet use cases (binary apps, etc).
    - dev_tty01 3y ago
      You can run x86 binaries on ARM Linux VMs running on Apple Silicon machines. https://developer.apple.com/documentation/virtualization/running_intel_binaries_in_linux_vms_with_rosetta https://developer.apple.com/documentation/virtualization/run...
      - hsbauauvhabzb 3y ago
        That doesn’t work well in all scenarios.
  - Tarball10 3y ago
    Kind of a edge case, but we were attempting to migrate from Docker to Podman, and found running x86 container images in Podman Desktop on M-series Macs to be unacceptably slow. Docker Desktop supports Rosetta 2 virtualization which performs fine, but Podman Desktop does not.
    - hmottestad 3y ago
      Podman Desktop is free and open source right? You could implement Rosetta 2 support, or maybe pay them to implement it for you? I shy away from x86 images too, even thought I use docker.
  - maerF0x0 3y ago
    PSA: Dont get a mac with apple silicon if you need/want Virtual Box https://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/Downloads https://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/Downloads
    - sgjohnson 3y ago

whalesalad 3y ago

I have 2x intel macbook pro's that are honestly paperweights. Apple Silicon is infinitely faster. It's a bummer because one of them is also a 2018 fully loaded and I would have a hard time even selling it to someone because of how much better the M2/M3 is. It's wild when I see people building hackintoshes on like a Thinkpad T480 ... its like riding a pennyfarthing bicycle versus a ducati. My M2 Air is my favorite laptop of all time. Keyboard is finally back to being epic (esp compared to 2018 era, which I had to replace myself and that was NOT fun). It has no fan so it never makes noise. I rarely plug it in for AC power. I can hack almost all day on it (using remote SSH vscode to my beefy workstation) without plugging in. The other night I worked for 4 hours straight refactoring a ton of vue components and it went from 100% battery to 91% battery.

ghaff 3y ago
That assumes you only use one laptop. I have a couple 2015 Macs that are very useful for browser tasks. They’re not paperweights and I use them daily.
- whalesalad 3y ago
  I have a rack in my basement with a combined 96 cores and 192gb of ram (proxmox cluster), and a 13900k/64gb desktop workstation for most dev work. I usually will offload workloads to those before leveraging one of these old laptops that is usually dead battery. If I need something for "browser tasks" (I am interpreting this as cross-browser testing?) I have dedicated VMs for that. For just browsing the web, my M2 is still king as it has zero fan, makes no noise, and will last for days without charging if you are just browsing the web or writing documentation. I would rather have a ton of beefy compute that is remotely accessible and one single lightweight super portable laptop, personally. I should probably donate these mac laptops to someone who is less fortunate. I would love to do that, actually.
  - xp84 3y ago
    > should donate Indeed. I keep around a 2015 MBP with 16GB (asked my old job's IT if I could just keep it when I left since it had already been replaced and wouldn't ever be redeployed) to supplement my Mac Mini which is my personal main computer. I sometimes use screen sharing, but mostly when I use the 2015 it's just a web browsing task. With adblocking enabled, it's 100% up to the task even with a bunch of tabs. Given probably 80% of people probably use webapps for nearly everything, there's a huge amount of life left in a late-stage Intel Mac for people who will never engage in the types of tasks I used to find sluggish on my 2015 (very large Excel sheet calculations and various kinds of frontend code transpilation). Heck, even that stuff ran amazingly better on my 16" 2019 Intel MBP, so I'd assume for web browsing your old Macs will be amazing for someone in need, assuming they don't have bad keyboards.

fragmede 3y ago

Your 5 year old computer is, well, 5 years old. It was once beefy but that's technology for you.

orenlindsey 3y ago

VSCode works perfectly.

baq 3y ago

I've got a 12700k desktop with windows and an M1 macbook (not pro!) and my pandas notebooks run noticeably faster on the mac unless I'm able to max out all cores on the Intel chip (this is after, ahem, fixing the idiotic scheduler which would put the background python on E-cores.) I couldn't believe it. Absolutely get an apple silicon machine, no contest the best hardware on the market right now.

kimixa 3y ago

The 2018 macbook pros weren't even using the best silicon of the time - they were in the middle of Intel's "14nm skylake again" period, and an AMD GPU from 2016. I suspect one of the reasons why Apple silicon looks so good is the previous generations were at a dip of performance. Maybe they took the foot off the gas WRT updates as they knew the M series of chips was coming soon?

doublepg23 3y ago
My theory is Apple bought Intel's timeline as much as anyone and Intel just didn't deliver.

eyelidlessness 3y ago

On my 2019 MBP, I found VSCode performance poor enough to be annoying on a regular basis, enough so that I would frequently defer restarting it or my machine to avoid the lengthy interruption. Doing basically anything significant would have the fans running full blast pretty much constantly. On my M2 Max, all of that is ~fully resolved. There is still some slight lag, and I have to figure it’s just the Electron tax, but never enough to really bother me, certainly not enough to defer restarting anything. And I can count the times I’ve even heard the fans on one hand… and even so, never for more than a few seconds (though each time has been a little alarming, just because it’s now so rare).

aragonite 3y ago

It depends on what specifically you find slow about VSCode. In my experience, some aspects of VSCode feel less responsive than Sublime simply due to intentional design choices. For example, VSCode's goto files and project symbol search is definitely not as snappy as Sublime's. But this difference is due to VSCode's choice to use debouncing (search is triggered after typing has stopped) as opposed to throttling (restricts function execution to a set time interval).

tmpfile 3y ago

If you find your compiles are slow, I found a bug in vscode where builds would compile significantly faster when the status bar and panel are hidden. Compiles that took 20s would take 4s with those panels hidden. https://github.com/microsoft/vscode/issues/160118 https://github.com/microsoft/vscode/issues/160118

hmottestad 3y ago
That was a year ago! At this point someone will complain that it’s a feature they use to warm their cat. Not every day one sees a user report a 5x performance issue that seems so simple to reproduce.
- lagadu 3y ago
  Obligatory relevant xkcd: https://xkcd.com/1172/ https://xkcd.com/1172/

mattgreenrocks 3y ago

VSCode is noticeably laggy on my 2019 MBP 16in to the point that I dislike using it. Discrete GPU helps, but it still feels dog slow.

firecall 3y ago

I’m a SublimeText die hard! I do regularly try VSCode to see what I’m missing. VS Code has great remote editing that I do use. However, on my M1 Pro 16”, VS Code is noticeable laggier than sublime Text! Just clicking on a file in the side bar and waiting for text to appear has lag. Many non-nerdy people might think it’s instant, but I can see the lag clearly! LOL For my tastes the VS Code UI is cluttered and generally feels slow. The extensions are great but also a nightmare of updates and alerts of things broken. If it’s your thing, you can use CoPilot in Sublime Text through a plugin that actually works really well! I’m on the fence about CoPilots benefits though. Sometimes I’ll flick over to VS Code to use the chat copilot if I need an answer for an API call etc…. If I had to stick with one, I’m sticking with Sublime Text.

balls187 3y ago

You have a 5-year old computer. I'm a professional and I make a living writing software. Investing ~4k every 3-4 years on fast computer is a no brainer to me.

Eric_WVGG 3y ago

give Panic’s Nova a look. “What if VSCode was a native app,” basically. I love it.