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Comment by balefrost | Hacker News Reader

One very specific performance metric is startup time, and Sublime beats the pants off VSCode in that department. Creating new top-level windows in VSCode is also annoyingly slow compared to Sublime (presumably because it's spinning up a new browser context). Other than that, it seems snappy enough.

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YMMV I suppose, but I’ve never noticed the startup times, and I frequently create/close windows (I often have 2-3 at a time).

I just started visual studio code on my workstation, and it took 9 seconds to display a window, followed by 2 more seconds before populating it with an empty document. Sublime was sub second startup

I've always had sub second startup times. With text rendered within the first 1.5-2 at most. Time to "Actual interactivity" usually takes around 3-5 seconds, but that's mostly due to my plugins. I could start typing per-se, just not in Vim mode.

I mostly leave the editor permanently open on the project I'm working on, so I guess I don't really notice it much either way. And using the integrated terminal to change one dir back and switch to another project, then opening it with code . is a pretty good flow so I don't feel stifled in that sense either.

> I mostly leave the editor permanently open on the project I'm working on

I leave Visual Studio permanently open, but I use sublime for quick edits/viewing/changes (e.g. opening a remote file on perforce, or modifying a config file), so even 2 seconds to interactivity is just too long.

My low-end MacBook opens it in less than 2 seconds.

Seems it checks for updates every once in a while. Took 6 seconds the first time with network activity. Second time it was <2 seconds.

I've just tried it on a gaming PC (i7, installed on an NVM SSD.) 4 second startup compared to instant for Sublime.

Even still 2 seconds is too long for quick edits.

Never tried Sublime (it sounds fantastic), but VSCode is lightning fast compared to the other IDEs I currently use or have used in the past: Eclipse, IntelliJ, Visual Studio, and MonoDevelop.

IntelliJ is probably the most annoying...it takes less time than VS does, but during the 2 minutes it takes to start it hijacks the OS window focus at least 5 times. I like to actually work on other things while waiting for that beast to start up and it constantly screws everything up.

Sure, Sublime is practically instant whereas VSCode takes... maybe slightly more than half a second on my machine.

It’s noticeable but is it really that much of an issue?

It's more noticeable on some peoples machines/setups, and some people are more sensitive to this type of performance.

Opening big files, opening lots of files, doing search and replace in open files, and my favourite, use thousands of parallel cursors to thousands of simultaneous edits in a single file, they are all noticeable slower in VSCode.

Damn, I love me them multiple cursors.

Never done thousands (wtf are you doing??) but I’ve done dozens and it’s been instant in VSCode.

Define large too - several mb? Or several 100?

Maybe you’re just an outlier?

I'll give you that, startup time could be better. I don't really consider that much of a problem, but I can see how people would disagree.

I just opened a new window with 9 file tabs, and it opened in 3 seconds. I'm using a 2012 quad i5 desktop with non SSD drives. I suspect with SSD, it will be 1-2 seconds.

For some reason people still consider startup time a metric worth paying attention to

I use VS Code most of the time, but the reason I always use Notepad for taking quick notes _is_ the startup time of VS Code. If they improved it, I'd be using it for both. It is an important metric for some.

If I need to take a quick look at a file but don't plan on actively doing a bunch of work on it, I usually open in Sublime for the same reason.

Still get syntax highlighting and everything, but waiting for VS Code can be long enough to derail my train of thought.

I work in IntelliJ IDEA whise startup times are horrible. However, since I always work on a set of projects, I never close them, so, essentially, startup time is 0.

Also, IDEA has scratch files for quick notes available through a shortcut (I guess VS Code might have a similar plugin), so startup tome isn’t an issue either.

Engineers like to optimize everything, including how they use their time. If you've got something in your head that you want to fix or write, you want to spend time doing just that, not staring at your screen waiting and maybe losing some of your mental model.

If you think a second or two matters when loading an editor you need to cut back on the coffee.

But you normally write code for an hour or many hours. Just opening one or two files for a quick fix sounds more like devops work.

That’s why I never close the project(s) I’m working on. So my startup time is instantaneous

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