Atom: Editor window startup is slow | Hacker News Reader

Atom: Editor window startup is slow

github.com

15 pointstosh11 comments

Amazing that so many comments compare Atom performance to Sublime and TextMate, but do not mention the fact that Sublime and TextMate are native while Atom is based on Electron. They profile module loads etc, but fail to recognize that Atom first has to start layout engine and JS engine, then initialize all that code and only after that it can start executing application code. As a personal rant, and performance issues aside, HTML5+CSS+JS is a terrible programming paradigm, unfortunately the only one that stuck for web apps. But to use the same paradigm on desktop????

I think it's important to keep drawing the distinction, but you're right, the thread didn't really point out the difference and that's what's missing in the conversation.

I think it's important to remind everyone of the world we used to live in where apps were native to the platform they ran on and were performant and power efficient. I think that's even more important than ever to remember now.

That said, somehow Microsoft has pulled off a miracle with VS Code as it's reasonably efficient and performant given the tech stack it's implemented on top of. I think a lot of this has to do with Microsoft being a company that established itself in OS and native application development for Windows. They have an ethic of performance whereas GitHub may not have had that at the time that Atom came on the scene.

Vscode is electron and starts in 1-2sec on my PC, so that isn't the issue.

This issue is from 2014 with last activity in November of last year. It was just marked as stale 15 days ago by a repo bot.

Am I missing something as to why this was posted?

Maybe because it’s been closed recently?

Probably because it’s unresolved 5 years later

That's interesting. Atom (last I checked) shows you profiling of how each package contributes to start-up time, and it's always been slow regardless. It seems like it's been consistently slow for 5.5 years now, which is unfortunate.

Start-up time was the number one reason I was not sold on the Luna language editor -- they were building it on top of Atom! (they are rebuilding it though, or maybe that is already done)

The profiler is nice but Atom was still too slow for my tastes. Then I found Sublime and plugins to replicate my Atom customization. I cannot go back to that.

For apps like Slack, I’m perfectly content with Electron.

I tried atom in the past and felt the definite slowness by comparison to other text editors, I would definitely need to check it out today to see if anything has changed. I currently use vscode and it feels really snappy for the practically the same functionality.

I also find it interesting that Microsoft is looming over both of these projects, I wonder what that will mean for the future.

Issue recently closed by Stale-bot, not updated since Nov 2018.

IME Atom is not nearly as slow as it used to be, unless you're on a remote FS or have many, many files in the project directory - like it scans them all when starting - so I just keep my project directory small.

Should you have to do that though?

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