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Comment by biocomputation | Hacker News Reader

Atom is ~30 years newer than the original version of Windows Notepad, and Atom runs on hardware that is orders of magnitude faster than the 286 on which early versions of Windows ran.

Yet Atom is still slower and laggier than Notepad running on Windows in 1986.

How did GitHub manage to pull off that feat? Given the fact that faster programs were made 30 years ago on vastly inferior hardware, Atom's performance absolutely deserves to be criticized.

I can start Visual Studio right now and make a simple Windows desktop app in an hour with a text editor whose performance ( startup/ file load / editing ) will blow Atom away.

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This point gets brought up a lot, and the criticism is fair, but only to a point. Atom's primary innovation is being built with HTML, JS, and CSS, and running on top of Electron that's running on top of Chromium. This design makes its internals approachable for a large audience. For lack of a better term, it's a first-party tech demo for Electron.

At this layer, you're pretty far from bare metal, and it's nice that it works as well as it does. In the future, I believe the need for so many layers will be lessened, when native script hosts and renderers can be leveraged, API calls shimmed between platforms, when packaging full Chromium is no longer necessary. Therefore I fully expect Atom to get better, both on the below-Electron side as native platforms evolve [1], and above, through optimizations.

For me, it's about expectation management. I expect Atom to be a proper text editor, but not necessarily a performant one yet, because I know how it's built.

[1] https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/uwp/get-started/cre...

>> Atom's primary innovation

They couldn't make it fast on modern hardware?

It's a significant indictment of the technology, and of GitHub's engineering that a product like Atom is slow on th high-end Dell hardware that my employer buys for me.

Atom's problem, which includes the astoundingly enormous amount of CPU and memory that it guzzles, is that the people who built it demonstrably didn't care about performance, didn't know better, or both.

Atom is a textbook example of how not to write software. I guess it's not only 'hackable to the core', but 'inefficient to the core'.

It's just bad software.

> It's a significant indictment of the technology

Yes, it is; much more so an indictment of the stack than Atom itself.

> didn't care about performance

Perhaps; I can see why they would prioritize features over performance.

> Atom is just a textbook example of how not to write software.

I disagree. I very much feel that Atom is about demonstrating an archetypal 'desktop application', like a text editor, in Electron. And Electron is about coding in HTML/JS/CSS, albeit currently it's backed by a entire shrinkwrapped Chromium, which means you're essentially stuck inside a particular browser and inherit all of its performance characteristics.

It's the Electron stack that must prove that it's viable in the long-term, but it's possible that Atom will catch a lot of the flak instead.

> Yet Atom is still slower and laggier than Notepad running on Windows in 1986.

I would love to see something beyond just a void claim of this. Numbers, a video, literally anything. Even though Atom has a completely different use case than Notepad, one is for a quick edit of a file and one is for managing a project including file indexing, project search, and plugins, I still don't believe this is true. And I don't even like Atom!

It would be great to post a video or some actual performance numbers, but I don't know where I'd get my hands on a 286 running the original version of Windows.

I'd wager, if you somehow could find it, your nostalgic view of the speed of a computer from the 80s would quickly diminish. Especially when you had to deal with more than one file with Notepad.

I was actually just a kid, so I don't really have nostalgic views of computer performance from the 1980s.

I do remember typing reports in Notepad. We had a PC because my parents couldn't afford a Mac.

Not against notepad exactly, but there are good numbers comparing it to other text editors on the same computer.

https://pavelfatin.com/typing-with-pleasure/

You can download the software he wrote and try it for yourself, on your different text editors with plugins etc.

I guess that's part of the disconnect between happy users and folks who find it too slow. Atom is an effective IDE for me. I have smart auto-completion, version-control integration, task runners, linting, and, for many of the languages I work with, definition lookup, a debugger, a repl, and inline reporting of compilation errors. It makes for a great markdown writer as well. As a daily one-off text editor I can understand the complaints. But compared to a proper IDE, the startup time is pretty competitive.

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