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Note that Atom and VSCode are "siblings" only in a very loose sense: they use the same app packaging technology [1]. This is enough for your point w.r.t. native software, but VSCode being a fork from Atom is a common misconception.

[1]: https://github.com/atom/electron

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Then again, emacs is not really native code. Everything outside the basic editing and display layer is implemented in elisp, whose VM and GC are not exactly state of the art (single threaded, no JIT, basic mark/sweep).

It still somehow manages to feel faster than many other editors.

Well Emacs is faster to me because its just a lisp interpreter written in C, tightly close to the hardware. So yes, Emacs is like 80% Elisp, but it still runs fast, and its stable. Editors like Atom are a bit too... "abstract" maybe. If I understand, Atom is CoffeeScript/JS running on a the Electron shell which runs on NodeJS which is written in C++ IIRC. Thats at least 3 levels of abstraction in my point of view, and knowing that Electron is Chrome based, it can't improve its speed. Simpler is faster

Yes I knew that, I meant native in the sense of "not close to the metal"

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