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Comment by timdorr | Hacker News Reader

I'm curious why Atom gets so much crap for being an Electron app, whereas VS Code is generally praised for it's speed. Are they doing something significantly different from each other?

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Atom loads plugins in the main thread, whereas VSCode runs them in a background thread. This alone makes a huge difference.

More here: https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/extensions/our-approach

Same excuse Firefox used to always make for its slowness; it's extensions fault. In the case of Atom, it's slower without any extensions installed, in my experience.

Totally possible, since Atom's core functionality is also plugin-based. Stuff like syntax highlighting etc. IIRC.

a simple example: on vscode, opening a file from remote fs does not lock the ui, atom (and sublime) freezes. vscode is pretty concurrent! the only thing somewhat slow seems to be regex matches which are single threaded but I am not sure they lock the ui

I suspect there's some bandwagonism at play in some of it, but I think the VS Code team has generally applied lessons learned from some of Atom's more obvious performance shortfalls (large file handling, for example, for which support was added very incrementally).

In my day-to-day usage I'm not seeing any significant performance differences between Atom and Code, but that may just be a function of my particular use cases, or it may well be that newer versions of Atom have, at least somewhat, caught up to VS Code.

The performance difference between Atom and VS Code is very noticeable on low and mid range PCs. Most of us here on HN are very fortunate that we can afford high end PCs that minimizes performances bottlenecks but we should keep in mind that most of the world isn't so fortunate and that good performance still matters.

Yeah, I've been floored at how well VSCode works on my ultrabook.

I've been developing on a chrome book for the past year. I can confirm that vs code runs very smooth, while atom is finicky and just flat out dies on opening large folders/files.

Kudos to another chromebook dev! Are you running Ubuntu in a Crouton, or another setup? I'm doing that and I run Atom without any complaints. It might just be the way I'm using it however.

I like Chromebooks for the OS, not for the hardware, so I use Secure Shell with tmux & vim.

I removed the write protection screw, upgraded my ssd, flashed on a new bios from https://mrchromebox.tech/, and installed galliumOS--originally I used chrubuntu, then straight ubunutu. Everything works great. Even installed display link drivers, so I can dock to 2 monitors at work.

Can you open arbitrarily large text files/directories in atom these days? Whenever, I open anything over a few thousand LOC atom seems to lock up for me. I was actually forced to switch from Atom to VSC, because I had a bad habit of accidentally clicking on `node_modules` in the file tree and crashing my session.

I had someone on here mention the write protection screw removal method to me before, I just couldn't bring myself to do it on my Pixel 2. But I should try it, I'm glad to hear someone say it worked out great for them. I definitely want to still be able to boot into the normal Chrome OS because it's preferable to me when I'm not working.

I think I see what you're saying. Maybe it's because the pixel is actually a beast, I don't notice it as much. I have VS Code installed, maybe I should give it another shot. I'm probably just used to Atom, and the only time I really used VSC I was trying to work on one of our really large .NET solutions and it just started throwing hundreds of errors at me. I should try one of my MEAN apps in it.

The pixel is in fact a beast. I almost bought one, but was worried about the tiny ssd. Do you find space limiting at all?

VS Code has been stellar for JS and Go. The ruby experience has been pretty meh. Definitely depends on language/community support.

VSC runs on chromebook? I did not know that. Mind sharing about your experience?

I am actually running galliumOS--an ubuntu-based distro for chromebooks.

If you take a look at your memory usage I think you would find that Atom consumes significantly more memory than VS Code. That's always been the case for me, at least.

the biggest memory footprint is gonna come from language servers I think, so check those.

Yeah, their JavaScript is better. Electron has nothing to do with the speed.

This, my start time on Atom -- using an SSD -- on Windows is several times longer than VS Code, it just feels jarring. On OS X the start times for Atom are a lot better though, in my experience.

The text editor component (i.e. the part people are most likely referring to when discussing performance) is completely different between Atom and VS Code. No relation at all between the two codebases. VS Code's derives from Visual Studio Online.

Just a thought but, it might just be that Atom is naturally compared with the likes of Sublime Text or gVim and VS Code is naturally compared with Visual Studio.

This makes a lot of since. It's not going to load as fast as most text editors, as it does a lot more out of the box. And most people using VS Code have spent years of their life waiting for VS to open.

Just because of the name? Visual Studio is a humongous IDE, and VS Code is a little text editor.

One of the developers explain why it's faster than atom, basically the are using different threads for different things and many optimization on viewbox

https://vimeo.com/174657014

This comes up every time there's an Atom or VSCode post, but I've yet to see a good explanation of the architectural differences that contribute to the performance differences. Does anyone have the scoop?

All I know is that the typescript code used in VS code looks almost like C#. Interfaces etc. I had a good look at the github.

I can only assume that leads to a very low leakyness and low memory usage.

From the visual studio code developer: https://vimeo.com/174657014

VSCode actually uses natively compiled C# codebase for all the processing and only uses Electron for the "View" part. Atom does everything in javascript.

No.

TypeScript 73.9% JavaScript 21.6% CSS 3.4% Inno Setup 0.8% HTML 0.2% Shell 0.1%

Do you have any references for this? I believe most are of the impression that VSCode run entirely on electron/node; even the editor, Monaco, which is written in JS.

Although, I believe their plugin system would allow plugins to be written in any language.

Because Microsoft pays people to shill for them on media sources like Hackernews.

Have you compared the two? Let's say there are "shills" on HN - it doesn't change the fact that many people see obvious differences in performance between the two editors. It's objectively verifiable. Maybe you're an anti-MS shill

I'm shilling for anti-shilling.

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