5 ms·

The 2MB/slowness isn't something that can just be "coded away". It's a direct result of the technology stack chosen. It is not a solvable problem. Therefore Ato

by PlzSnow 12y ago

The 2MB/slowness isn't something that can just be "coded away". It's a direct result of the technology stack chosen. It is not a solvable problem. Therefore Atom cannot succeed beyond niche usage.

pbiggar 12y ago
"not a solvable problem" and "cannot succeed" are very strong assertions that are not backed up by evidence.
laurent123456 12y ago
Why is there a 2MB limit anyway? Is it because the document is rendered to HTML? In this case, why don't they render only the part currently visible on screen?
- iends 12y ago
  https://github.com/atom/atom/pull/1607/files https://github.com/atom/atom/pull/1607/files The editor is intentionally crippled.
  - davidy123 12y ago
    They were probably tired of people complaining about problems with this corner case of opening humongous files in an editor meant for editing source code. Atom properly should be optimized for kilobyte sized files, not megabyte.
    - jussij 12y ago
      Machines these days have Giga Bytes of RAM so handling a file only a few megabytes in size should hardly be an issue. I'm the author of the Zeus editor and I regularly use an old 1.25 Pentium with 512 MBytes of RAM to test the performance of the editor. Even running on that 15 year old machine Zeus stays fully responsive while editing a 60+ MByte file. For a modern day tool a 2 Mega file limit seems rather low.
      - userbinator 12y ago
        Atom is essentially a web browser running a text editing web app. Given how much web pages tend to "expand" when loaded into memory in a browser, it's not so surprising. I'm guessing that Zeus isn't based on a web browser but was designed from the beginning to be an editor.
        jussij 12y ago
        Zeus, like a lot of text editors is an in memory editor, which basically means it loads the whole file into memory. So it too is limited by the total memory available to the application. For a 32 bit Windows application the available memory comes in at around 2 Gigs and for a 64 bit Windows application that explodes to 8 Terra bytes. So even if Atom was 32 bit it should have 2 Gigs of memory to play with. I'm not sure why Atom does limit files to 2 megs, but if it is because of the expansion of memory then there must be some serious expanding happening there.
        Cthulhu_ 12y ago
        > Zeus isn't based on a web browser but was designed from the beginning to be an editor. But Atom was also supposed to be an editor...

by PlzSnow 12y ago

The 2MB/slowness isn't something that can just be "coded away". It's a direct result of the technology stack chosen. It is not a solvable problem. Therefore Atom cannot succeed beyond niche usage.

pbiggar 12y ago

"not a solvable problem" and "cannot succeed" are very strong assertions that are not backed up by evidence.

laurent123456 12y ago

Why is there a 2MB limit anyway? Is it because the document is rendered to HTML? In this case, why don't they render only the part currently visible on screen?

iends 12y ago
https://github.com/atom/atom/pull/1607/files https://github.com/atom/atom/pull/1607/files The editor is intentionally crippled.
- davidy123 12y ago
  They were probably tired of people complaining about problems with this corner case of opening humongous files in an editor meant for editing source code. Atom properly should be optimized for kilobyte sized files, not megabyte.
  - jussij 12y ago
    Machines these days have Giga Bytes of RAM so handling a file only a few megabytes in size should hardly be an issue. I'm the author of the Zeus editor and I regularly use an old 1.25 Pentium with 512 MBytes of RAM to test the performance of the editor. Even running on that 15 year old machine Zeus stays fully responsive while editing a 60+ MByte file. For a modern day tool a 2 Mega file limit seems rather low.
    - userbinator 12y ago
      Atom is essentially a web browser running a text editing web app. Given how much web pages tend to "expand" when loaded into memory in a browser, it's not so surprising. I'm guessing that Zeus isn't based on a web browser but was designed from the beginning to be an editor.
      - jussij 12y ago
        Zeus, like a lot of text editors is an in memory editor, which basically means it loads the whole file into memory. So it too is limited by the total memory available to the application. For a 32 bit Windows application the available memory comes in at around 2 Gigs and for a 64 bit Windows application that explodes to 8 Terra bytes. So even if Atom was 32 bit it should have 2 Gigs of memory to play with. I'm not sure why Atom does limit files to 2 megs, but if it is because of the expansion of memory then there must be some serious expanding happening there.
      - Cthulhu_ 12y ago
        > Zeus isn't based on a web browser but was designed from the beginning to be an editor. But Atom was also supposed to be an editor...