Hacker News Reader

Comment by rubber_duck | Hacker News Reader

Meh - I used IntelliJ IDEA, Visual Studio and Visual Studio Code on a daily basis and VSCode is the most responsive environment by far - both in terms of UI responsiveness and operation speed. Now you can argue it's not as fully featured as the mentioned IDEs but it's obviously not just about native vs electron, and electron can provide a good enough experience.

View on HN

Your anecdotes seem to be directly contradicted by hard data. IDEA with zero latency typing[1] has an order of magnitude lower latency than vscode[2]

[1] https://pavelfatin.com/typing-with-pleasure/

[2] https://github.com/Microsoft/vscode/issues/27378

Latency of the typing is not the same thing as general UI responsiveness.

The performance I'm talking about is stuff like code analysis chugging and stalling the editor so I don't understand how your link is contradicting anything from my post.

Lint/hints taking forever to update after code editing, autocomplete popup takes a second to show, etc. This depends on codebase naturally but in my experience for the cases where VS Code works well (mostly typescript) on the same codebase and same PC it's much more responsive than IDEA tools or Visual Studio (and I'm running this on a i9 MBP with 32GB ram so not a weak HW thing).

I type on a 60hz monitor and I'm not particularly sensitive to that kind of latency (this is where I consider VS Code good enough)

That is like comparing cars based on the latency of the door unlock button.

I mean sure, faster is better, but door unlock speed is probably not the problem that makes people think a car is “slow”.

The zero latency sounds cool, but there are other issues with the IDE on OSX. There is issue [1] how the UI is repainted on any interaction with the IDE [2]

[1] - https://youtrack.jetbrains.com/issue/JBR-526

[2] - https://photos.app.goo.gl/UmZ8GiVmrGYBbzyV9

Definitely VS code feels so much more responsive than IntelliJ.

If the feature becomes on par with IntelliJ, everyone would jump ship. But not today.

Is JetBrain stack native? I don't think it is.

Java/Kotlin mix, I believe

That's another thing, Java apps just feel heavy. Like its got a couple of kilos of lead attached to it. Ever used Eclipse IDE? Holycrap.

Also, Eclipse and Jet Brains software feel more similar to each other and now that you mentioned Java, that makes sense.

Have you actually ever used IntelliJ? It doesn't feel "heavy" compared to say Visual Studio (the real one, not Code).

I haven't used IntelliJ per se but I've used CLion which is similar sofware from Jet Brains. To me, both feel super heavy.

They’ve piled everything on the UI thread like a freshman, now they are paying the price.

It's not similar, it's the exact same code, just with features turned off. If I open a C project in IntelliJ it's literally the CLion plug-in.

VS on small projects feels pretty light. It's only on the larger projects and maybe Resharper in the mix that it becomes difficult

I have used IntelliJ for years. I have found nothing I prefer to it. It is absolutely, beyond a shadow of a doubt, heavier than depleted uranium.

No, it's based on Java's Swing.

Visual Studio is, JetBrains is JVM - but still closer to native than DOM.

How is Swing closer to native than DOM?

For one, Swing isn't build on top of technologies that specialize in displaying interactive documents

Intuitively it it feels like that should make swing faster, but experientially swing feels heavy and slow.

Is swing poorly optimized, is it due to being in Java?

I'm not a UI dev and have not thought about it much.

I'd agree that Swing feels heavy... but Electron feels an order of magnitude heavier.

Though, when done right, it feels fairly close to native. I earn my pay working with IDEA and if you turn off the plugins you don't need its actually quite snappy where you would reasonably expect it to be. I would bet it takes far less optimization to get there than an equivalent Electron application

You aren't sandboxed - you can reach out to native API/code if you hit some limits, you have threads, etc.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com