Btw, I develop on an 14'' i3 3rd gen, 8gig, no-ssd laptop, and I am able to do react-native dev, with the emulator running just fine
I setup the dev team of a startup(in Delhi, India) I was consulting with with Atom for react and node dev few months back. These guys were provided pretty shitty, and pretty old, 4 gig ram laptops. And they used to screw up things which could've easily been resolved with in-text-editor linting. I got them running atom with emmet, babel and ESlint, and they are still using it without any issues.
I have seen atom run reasonably well on really shitty machines. Its very hard for me to accept that all this complaining about its performance is not FUD.
I've been trying Atom every 3 months since it came out. Just a few plugins and Linting and is still very slow and I hate lag while typing.
I don't have this problem with Sublime, for example, where typing is instant. Even eclipse and Android studio are more responsive when typing.
It runs well enough on my laptop with a 4th gen i7, 8gb ram, ssd, running linux but cpu utilization is rather high. Scrolling inside a moderately sized file puts a 20-30% load on all 4 of my threads. If I enable on the fly linting, autocomplete features, minimap, and etc, it starts to add up.
I've used vim, emacs, and sublime text and I've found that with my uses cases (mainly python development), atom ranks at the bottom of efficiency and performance (but highest in productivity). I consider myself a proponent of atom and it's currently my favorite editor, especially with vim-mode but it has it's drawbacks. It's just not a fair fight; comparing the performance/efficiency of atom to editors written in c/c++ doesn't make sense to me.