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Comment by badminton1 | Hacker News Reader

I've used Visual Studio for many years.

Visual Studio 5.0 was very responsive. Visual Studio 2015 is not as responsive. Nowadays it seemes a bit bloated, even after disabling unused plugins and features.

Switched to CLion and Rider, which are not known for their speed, but feel more responsible than VS to me. That and a more affordable price and cross-platform support.

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I am sorry we lost you and we're very aware of the need to improve IDE performance and have invested a lot into this release towards that goal. Just one example to read is this blog series when the product was still codenamed VS "15". https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/visualstudio/2016/10/14/imp...

(VS "15" is Visual Studio 2017)

We also have Visual Studio Code for those who want a lighter code editor, see: http://code.visualstudio.com

The perceived performance might not be necessarily only due to Visual Studio itself.

Could also have to do with the filesystem in newer versions of Windows (file operations seem slower in modern versions), the shell, background services and other characteristics of the OS.

I help launch products here at Microsoft and run developer events (including this launch) but at heart and for 18+ years I'm a developer first, and I can totally relate to what you mean in terms of everything being part of the bigger story that matters.

I am very biased so don't listen to me lol, but I do think Windows 10 and the various developer tools release we've done over the last few years have really pushed things forward but of course we are very much listening to our community so please make your voice heard.

Well, in fairness, it is a very solid product.

I haven't quantifiably measured the time that each operation takes, so I might be biased to some extent.

My experience of installing VS Community Edition several years ago was that it downloaded a lot of dependencies when I requested a fairly basic C# and C++ environment: versions of SQLXML, Windows SDK, etc, which had to be managed and upgraded separately.

Is it much more self-contained now? perhaps via nuget?

New Installation Experience - A reduced minimum footprint for faster and more customizable installations, as well as support for offline installs.

Visual Studio IDE - A broad range of enhancements in Visual Studio 2017, including reduction in startup and solution load times, sign in and identity improvements, improved code navigation, open folder view, and connected services enable connections between your app and any service on-premises or in the cloud.

https://www.visualstudio.com/en-us/news/releasenotes/vs2017-...

From what I'm hearing from the talk, there's a heavy focus on making the individual components faster, but my biggest performance problem si that slow things lock up the whole IDE. I'm okay that some thing take long but when they mean I can't edit anything, even completely unrelated stuff when you're grinding away opening the lousy table designer UI in SSDT, that's a big problem.

I have the feeling that a big problem with VS is less about raw performance and more about old school blocking code, ironic considering how good C/F# are for async programming. VS just tends to "freeze" where other IDEs would throw up a spinner somewhere and let you carry on more or less unmolested. It does seem to be getting better though, keep up the good work!

@LyalinDotCom, if you want a real world example of something causing poor performance, then clone my project [1]. There are a couple of 3mb T4 code-gen'd files [2][3] that bring VS to its knees. I suspect it's actually the Roslyn compiler, but can't be certain. I know that if I wipe the code in those files then the performance is restored.

[1] https://github.com/louthy/language-ext/

[2] https://github.com/louthy/language-ext/blob/master/LanguageE...

[3] https://github.com/louthy/language-ext/blob/master/LanguageE...

I used to be a pretty big fan of VS Code until it started defaulting to Powershell recently. Due to PS security policies, common development tasks are blocked in all but the most common tools. It's also got some aliases that get in the way. I know it's possible to get around these issues, but it's enough of a hassle that I migrated back to Atom for web development.

There's so much productivity features in VS there's no excuse to invest in a faster machine. Or add more memory. Memory is cheap.

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