Comment by mtm7 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mtm7 | Hacker News Reader

Related: I was bored last Sunday, so I decided to install Sublime Text. I'm normally a VS Code user, but VS Code is built on Electron and it felt a little sluggish for certain files, so I wanted to give something else a try.

I've been using Sublime all week and it feels like an engineering masterpiece. Everything is instantly responsive. It jumps between files without skipping a beat. My battery lasts longer. (I don't want to turn this into an editor debate, though. Just a personal example.)

If you would've asked me a month ago, I would've said that engineers cared too much about making things performant to the millisecond. Now, I would say that many of them don't care enough. I want every application to be this responsive.

I never realized how wasteful web tech was until I stopped using it. And I guess you could say the same for a lot of websites – we bloat everything with node_modules and unnecessary CSS and lose track of helping our users accomplish their goals.

If I remember correctly, this is like the third comment I have read on HN in years that shows Sublime Text is faster than VSCode.

I have been arguing about this since may be 2016 or earlier, on HN it was the echo chamber of how much faster VSCode is compared to Atom! I cant believe this is built on Electron etc. And with every VSCode update I tried and while it was definitely faster than Atom, it was no way near as fast as Sublime. And every time this was brought up the answer was they felt no different between VSCode and Sublime or VSCode is fast enough it didn't matter.

The biggest problem of all problems is not seeing it as a problem.

I hope VSCode will continue to push the boundary of Electron Apps, they had a WebGL Render if I remember correctly that was way faster, not sure if there are anymore things in the pipeline.

VSCode WebGL link - was enabled in one of the latest versions as an experimental feature for terminal: https://code.visualstudio.com/updates/v1_41#_new-experimenta...

I used to choose Eclipse over IntelliJ for similar reasons years ago. When it came to refactoring and other integrated features IntelliJ won, but Eclipse could do partial compilation on save and the run of a unit test automatically within moments, something which on IntelliJ invoked a Maven build that often took minutes.

The performance of feedback and the speed with which you can go through the basic cycle of coding and testing it works as expected is the speed at which you can develop code and the editor is a pretty critical part of that.

Interestingly enough I had kind of the opposite experience

Since I haven't done much with Java itself, the build times weren't as impactful on me.

What made a big change was how IntelliJ, despite being pure Swing GUI, was order of magnitude lower latency, from as simple things as booting the whole IDE, to operating on, well, everything.

Then I switched from Oracle to IBM J9 and I probably experienced yet another order of magnitude speedup.

Weird to compare an IDE and a text editor, though.

VS CODE [1] is a text editor. Visual Studio [2] is the IDE.

[1] https://code.visualstudio.com/

[2] https://visualstudio.microsoft.com/vs/

VS Code has Intellisense, an integrated debugger, and much more. What makes it not an IDE?

VS Code and Sublime Text are comparable, though: they're both extensible text editors, not real IDEs.

VS Code ~= VS. It's a text editor, not an IDE (unless you consider things like VIM to be IDEs because you can use plugins to do IDE-like stuff with them.)

That's kind of a marketing distinction. VS is not a kind of monolithic spaghetti monster system: internally, it is made of components, which provide a text editor, indexing for various languages, etc.

You can do likewise with VS Code or other environments, except maybe some plugins are not installed by default.

In the end it boils down to: how do we define an IDE? And even if it is about bundled capabilities, I would still be able to create a "dedicated" (would not need much modification) Linux distro and declare it to be an IDE.

It was easier to distinguish IDE from other things in the MS-DOS era.

What makes it not an IDE to you? VS Code has first class Intellisense, an integrated debugger, ...

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