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Comment by andrepd | Hacker News Reader

> Issues: [...] Slow on single cores, Raspberry Pi

A text editor that is slow on 1GHz single-core machines. What a time to be alive.

Also: A terminal-based text editor written on top of node using parts of Atom.

Well, I'll give it a try if I have some time. I'm very curious what those "amazing features that make you drop Emacs" might be ;-)

Edit: Actually, does anyone know what the problem with a single core might be? If it's written in Javascript, it can't be that strongly relying on concurrency, can it? Or is it just the fact that it has to share "its" CPU core with the rest of the system?

Edit2: TIL: There's a library providing react-bindings for terminal interfaces[1]. I have to admit, I would've never expected that.

[1]: https://github.com/Yomguithereal/react-blessed

React Blessed is a really fun library too! Makes terminal tools a bit easier to write

Agreed! I wish the sources of CygnusEd (Amiga) were open. Those guys nearly 30 years ago made a graphical text editor which on a 16 bit CPU clocked at 8MHz run circles around most today editors on 32/64 bit CPUs clocked over two orders of magnitude higher.

Do we have to count optimization as a forgotten art, at least among non system developers?

Only programmer time/effort matters anymore, to hell with the end users time, productivity, battery life and whatever other applications they happen to be running.

This brought memories! There's a video on Youtube showing CED in action... Ladies and gentlemen, this is how a graphical text editor scrolled text 30 years ago on a 8 MHz 16 bit machine!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L41oIvre9K0

> 8 MHz 16 bit

... and custom blit and other processors.

> on 32/64 bit CPUs clocked over two orders of magnitude higher

... with monster GPUs.

Nitpicking, but the Motorola 68000 was/is a 32 bit CPU, with 8 32-bit data registers (D0-D7) and 8 32-bit address registers (A0-A7, the latter used as a stack pointer). But CygnusEd probably took advantage of the Amiga co-processors for its gorgeous smooth scrolling effect...

Totally correct. For some reason I was thinking of the 68008 used in the Sinclair QL and thought "hah! that is the 8 bit version, then the 68K is 16 bit!". Yeah, but that was about addressing, not data registers width. ...Big oooops! (and I learned Amiga programming with 68K asm... (ducks and covers) :-)

About the coprocessors, surely Amiga offered a lot in this context, but I can't believe that today video cards cannot do the same with specialized hardware a hundred times faster (if we only take pure clock speed into account). There is something wrong with today software: machines get faster and faster, yet basic stuff like manipulating graphical elements didn't gain much in usability although more speed must have at least brought better granularity in dealing with events. OS complexity surely plays a role, AmigaOS occupied hundreds of Kilobytes -that's about 1/1000 of a modern OS core- but come on.... having to stuff a multicore 1GHz+ CPU plus fast GPU just to have a browser surf the net without dying is plain ridiculous.

I was very puzzled about that too, so I looked at the repo and... it's written in Javascript.

No wonder.

yeah, I clicked to the colored bar to see the distribution of languages in the repo, expecting to see C/C++ or even Pyhthon, and was shocked to see that 96.5% is javascript.

Well, that explains such an extensive list of features, I guess..

I'm not saying that JavaScript is an efficient choice, especially when likely depending on a gazillion NPM modules... but do you realise that python is actually an order of magnitude slower than JavaScript these days? unless the body of your performance sensitive code is within a python library python is very slow. I find the problem with most slow javascript is poorly written code and an unnecessarily deep dependency tree (NPM are not flat dependencies !).

CPython is of course slow. PyPy is fast-ish (and higher memory).

CPython is trivially easy to integrate with fast C though.

Presumably this wasn't so much a result of free choice, as of the desire to enable access to, say, Atom packages?

Yeah it looks to be javascript... so, well that's that.

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