3 ms·

If you want electron app that doesn't lag terribly, you'll end up rewriting ui layer from scratch anyway. VSCode already renders terminal on GPU and GPU-rendere

by nurumaik 11mo ago

If you want electron app that doesn't lag terribly, you'll end up rewriting ui layer from scratch anyway. VSCode already renders terminal on GPU and GPU-rendered editor area is in experimental. There will soon be no web ui left at all

HumanOstrich 11mo ago
I'm not sure how you went from terminal and editor GPU rendering, which can benefit from it, to "there will soon be no web ui left at all".
matsz 11mo ago
> VSCode already renders terminal on GPU When did they add that? Last time I used it, it was still based on xterm.js. Also, technically Chromium/Blink has GPU rendering built in for web pages, so everything could run on GPU.
- jcheng 11mo ago
  Wow, it's true--Terminal is <canvas>, while the editor is DOM elements (for now). I'm impressed that I use both every day and never noticed any difference.
- nurumaik 11mo ago
  Enabled by default since about a year > GPU acceleration driven by the WebGL renderer is enabled in the terminal by default. This helps the terminal work faster and display at a high FPS by significantly reducing the time the CPU spends rendering each frame https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/terminal/appearance#_gpu-acceleration https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/terminal/appearance#_gpu-...
  - Tyriar 11mo ago
    It's actually been the default since v1.55 which released early April 2021: https://code.visualstudio.com/updates/v1_55#_webgl-renderer-is-the-new-default https://code.visualstudio.com/updates/v1_55#_webgl-renderer-... Before that from v1.17 (~October 2017) it was using a 2d canvas context: https://code.visualstudio.com/blogs/2017/10/03/terminal-renderer https://code.visualstudio.com/blogs/2017/10/03/terminal-rend...
morganherlocker 11mo ago
> If you want electron app that doesn't lag terribly My experience with VS Code is that it has no perceptible lag, except maybe 500ms on startup. I don't doubt people experience this, but I think it comes down to which extensions you enable, and many people enable lots of heavy language extensions of questionable quality. I also use Visual Studio for Windows builds on C++ projects, and it is pretty jank by comparison, both in terms of UI design and resource usage. I just opened up a relatively small project (my blog repo, which has 175 MB of static content) in both editors and here's the cold start memory usage without opening any files: - Visual Studio Code: 589.4 MB - Visual Studio 2022: 732.6 MB update: I see a lot of love for Jetbrains in this thread, so I also tried the same test in Android Studio: 1.69 GB!
- skydhash 11mo ago
  That easily takes the worst designed benchmark in my opinion. Have you tried Emacs, VIM, Sublime, Notepad++,... Visual Studio and Android Studio are full IDEs, meaning upon launch, they run a whole host of modules and the editor is just a small part of that. IDEs are closer to CAD Software than text editors.
  - throwaway2037 11mo ago
    I never understand why developers spend so much time complaining about "bloat" in their IDEs. RAM is so incredibly cheap compared to 5/10/15/20 years ago, that the argument has lost steam for me. Each time I install a JetBrains IDE on a new PC, one of the first settings that I change is to increase the max memory footprint to 8GB of RAM.
    - skydhash 11mo ago
      I don’t really complain about bloat in IDEs. They have their uses. But VSCode feature set is a text editor and it’s really bloated for that.
    - Dylan16807 11mo ago
      > RAM is so incredibly cheap compared to 5/10/15/20 years ago Compared to 20 years ago that's true. But most of the improvement happened in the first few years of that range. With the recent price spikes RAM actually costs more today than 10 years ago. If we ignore spikes and buy when the cycle of memory prices is low, DDR3 in 2012 was not much more than the price DDR5 was sitting at for the last two years.

HumanOstrich 11mo ago

I'm not sure how you went from terminal and editor GPU rendering, which can benefit from it, to "there will soon be no web ui left at all".

matsz 11mo ago

> VSCode already renders terminal on GPU When did they add that? Last time I used it, it was still based on xterm.js. Also, technically Chromium/Blink has GPU rendering built in for web pages, so everything could run on GPU.

jcheng 11mo ago
Wow, it's true--Terminal is <canvas>, while the editor is DOM elements (for now). I'm impressed that I use both every day and never noticed any difference.
nurumaik 11mo ago
Enabled by default since about a year > GPU acceleration driven by the WebGL renderer is enabled in the terminal by default. This helps the terminal work faster and display at a high FPS by significantly reducing the time the CPU spends rendering each frame https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/terminal/appearance#_gpu-acceleration https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/terminal/appearance#_gpu-...
- Tyriar 11mo ago
  It's actually been the default since v1.55 which released early April 2021: https://code.visualstudio.com/updates/v1_55#_webgl-renderer-is-the-new-default https://code.visualstudio.com/updates/v1_55#_webgl-renderer-... Before that from v1.17 (~October 2017) it was using a 2d canvas context: https://code.visualstudio.com/blogs/2017/10/03/terminal-renderer https://code.visualstudio.com/blogs/2017/10/03/terminal-rend...

morganherlocker 11mo ago

> If you want electron app that doesn't lag terribly My experience with VS Code is that it has no perceptible lag, except maybe 500ms on startup. I don't doubt people experience this, but I think it comes down to which extensions you enable, and many people enable lots of heavy language extensions of questionable quality. I also use Visual Studio for Windows builds on C++ projects, and it is pretty jank by comparison, both in terms of UI design and resource usage. I just opened up a relatively small project (my blog repo, which has 175 MB of static content) in both editors and here's the cold start memory usage without opening any files: - Visual Studio Code: 589.4 MB - Visual Studio 2022: 732.6 MB update: I see a lot of love for Jetbrains in this thread, so I also tried the same test in Android Studio: 1.69 GB!

skydhash 11mo ago
That easily takes the worst designed benchmark in my opinion. Have you tried Emacs, VIM, Sublime, Notepad++,... Visual Studio and Android Studio are full IDEs, meaning upon launch, they run a whole host of modules and the editor is just a small part of that. IDEs are closer to CAD Software than text editors.
- throwaway2037 11mo ago
  I never understand why developers spend so much time complaining about "bloat" in their IDEs. RAM is so incredibly cheap compared to 5/10/15/20 years ago, that the argument has lost steam for me. Each time I install a JetBrains IDE on a new PC, one of the first settings that I change is to increase the max memory footprint to 8GB of RAM.
  - skydhash 11mo ago
    I don’t really complain about bloat in IDEs. They have their uses. But VSCode feature set is a text editor and it’s really bloated for that.
  - Dylan16807 11mo ago
    > RAM is so incredibly cheap compared to 5/10/15/20 years ago Compared to 20 years ago that's true. But most of the improvement happened in the first few years of that range. With the recent price spikes RAM actually costs more today than 10 years ago. If we ignore spikes and buy when the cycle of memory prices is low, DDR3 in 2012 was not much more than the price DDR5 was sitting at for the last two years.