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Comment by didibus | Hacker News Reader

I think there's opportunity for a new, more modern IDE. Something better then Eclipse and IntelliJ, but that's not built on top of JavaScript. Doubt there's the funding for it though, but there's definitely the need (of devs hungry for it, but not willing to pay anything for it either).

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> but that's not built on top of JavaScript

I know this is a turn-off for a lot of people, but I still don't see why. Why you need an IDE that doesn't use JS?

VSC feels super fast to me. It certainly has better performance than Eclipse ever had, and feels less janky than IntelliJ.

I know some people like the light speed of Sublime, but to me there's a certain threshold where it's just fast enough. And that's where VSC is.

JS just isn't a great language for text manipulation. Even if you ignore that it is a pretty slow language.

Most JS engines have very fast rope-like implementations of strings in JavaScript. String operations in modern JS engines are very fast and hard to beat in any language. Updating the text buffer is fast. Displaying it on the screen is the slow part. Anything touching the DOM is slow. But you can use the 2d Canvas instead, which is fast.

Also, if we ever get something like Mozilla's Servo technology in something like Electron combined with WebAssembly and you truly have a very powerful platform with lots of development options

> something like Mozilla's Servo technology in something like Electron combined with WebAssembly (...)

That still seems too heavy to me. Surely a native runtime for WebAssembly doesn't necessarily require Node and Chromium and all of Electron's bloat?

Well, I was speaking conceptually when I said 'something like'. There are parts of the evolving web platform that are very capable of delivering very high performance rivaling native.

But does WebAssembly need the "web platform" outside of the web?

WebAssembly does not. However, for UI presentation you would want Servo and Stylo.

I have aarch64 and 4GB of memory. Electron apps are not kind to either.

http://roryok.com/blog/2017/08/electron-memory-usage-compare...

Netbeans nightly and JDK9 is quite nice on this platform.

So will a well-written Electron app like VSCode. It's not like Java hasn't had the exact same challenges leveled for decades because people wrote bad code without thinking about resource usage.

I don't see an aarch64 or arm linux distribution for VSCode.

https://code.visualstudio.com/Download

Java works now. VS Code doesn't. Neither does Atom. Or any other Electron app. ARM is a pretty popular arch these days. They might want to work on that.

This thread started with a complaint about building things in a language which wasn't JavaScript. Getting better ARM support is a reasonable thing – and they have open work on GitHub to save you the trouble of building it yourself – but it doesn't have much to do with the language.

> (...) I know some people like the light speed of Sublime, but to me there's a certain threshold where it's just fast enough. (...)

I feel the same way too. I was a Sublime Text fan/user for a few years until did the change to Atom and finally settle down on VSC two years ago. VSC is fast enough for me. Also, LSP seems interesting, ripgrep-backed search, official support for Python (as an extension) and so on.

EDIT: formatting

>I know this is a turn-off for a lot of people, but I still don't see why. Why you need an IDE that doesn't use JS?

Honestly? This is going to be unpopular:

I resent javascript and the people who write it. I feel like there's this huge cohort of mediocre developers who learned javascript either on their own via tutorials or one of those boot camps, and then just never progressed from there, skillwise.

I feel like this cohort is behind what I perceive to be the gradual but inexorable decline in quality of the web in terms of user-friendliness. Javascript and the people who write it have steadily made my experience as a user worse while simultaneously making it easier for huge advertising conglomerates to track me and sell my data to the highest bidder. I'll say nothing of intelligence agencies that unfortunately do have reason to target me because of my work using those same loopholes.

In any case, I perceive Electron to be an enabler for these mediocre developers to peddle their horrible, poorly-performant spyware on the desktop platform because they're too scared to venture outside their comfort zone and learn something other than javascript. Why should I run a whole frigging browser just to display some text?

Not all ideas are created equal, and I just wish Brendan Eich had maybe gone back to the drawing board.

This again...

If you really believe that the "decline in quality of the web" can be attributed to web developers, then I'm sorry but you're just not seeing the big picture.

Marketers want more and more precise user tracking and analytics.

Designers want bigger and heavier images (and videos!) embedded directly in a website's homepage. They want custom, web-unfriendly fonts that have to be downloaded.

Financial stakeholders want cleverer, more intrusive ads that can bypass ad blockers.

And users want desktop apps that they can "install" by bookmarking a URL.

What can devs do about this? Nothing. Refuse to engage in it? Someone else will gladly take your job. In the end, there were clear economic incentives for the web to evolve this way. In this capitalistic economy, there was just no other possible direction.

I have ten years of experience in professional web development. I personally hate Javascript too. It's a terrible language and an even more terrible ecosystem. But in the end, you can write good software in anything. What you don't let like about the web today has little to do with the technology it is built on... Or the people developing for it.

So instead of having a spine and/or ethics, when marketers and financial stakeholders come asking for more intrusive ads and better tracking, what have javascript developers done?

They have been enablers. Every single time.

What's your point? That every javascript developer is unethical because companies are hiring javascript developers to do bad things?

A question was asked why people don't like Electron apps. I answered.

Eclipse feels dated, but IntelliJ is quite possibly the best IDE I've ever used. The Android tooling can be a bit of a beast (until I got 8 real cores it often gave me 1990s style concurrency issues), but the IDE itself is simply superlative. It leaves me wanting for nothing.

I think IntelliJ is excellent. I can't imagine a better IDE.

You making a good job not saying "emacs" =)

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