VSCode is a poor example. Its a fully featured IDE, and sure it would be lighter without electron, but it still wouldn't be a lightweight piece of software. I use JetBrains which is not Electron, but also uses it's fair share of ram.
I did this with the Eclipse Language server and my memory usage cut in half on the same project.
Think of it this way: if you have a system full of apps that conform to platform conventions, then you only need to learn the platform conventions and you’re suddenly more or less an expert in every new app you encounter.
If you need to learn every. single. apps. stupid rules and UI all over again, then sure, you can transfer skills in that one app over to another platform, but that’s it. You want an email app? Good luck learning every keyboard shortcut and ridiculous UI decision all over again.
Let’s just say this paradigm shift has not been driven by people with OCD (or good taste, for that matter).
It's essentially only using HTML and JS as the UI engine.
Even my 9 year old laptop can run VSCode just as fast as my 3 year old main machine.
Back in 1998 when Visual Studio 6.0 (actually just the second publicly released version) was released, it took ages to load and used up quite some RAM. 6 years later, when I switched to VS.NET 2003, VS6 ran super fast on my PC.
The difference was, however, that my 1998 PC was a 300MHz Pentium II with 64MB of RAM, wheras my 2003 machine was a n overclocked AMD Athlon XP at more than 2500MHz with 2GB of RAM.
Now compare that with my 2011 laptop vs. my 2017 laptop: my 2011 machine has a dual core 2.5GHz CPU with 8GB of RAM. My 2017 laptop is a dual core 3.5GHz CPU with 16GB of RAM.
22 years ago, 5 years of progress meant a 10x increase in RAM and 8x increase in CPU speed. During the past 10 years we saw a doubling in RAM (barely, TBH) and maybe 1.5x in CPU speed (at the same core count).
That's why the old software felt so fast - because we used it during a time when a major PC upgrade actually meant something. If you used a software package for five years, you could actually see more than a doubling in performance (e.g. Core2Duo E8600, 2008 vs Core i3-4350, 2013 [1]).
That's just not the case anymore and skews our perception regarding performance heavily towards "lean" vintage apps.
[1] https://www.techspot.com/article/1039-ten-years-intel-cpu-co...
I distinctly remember subsequent versions (.NET 2002, which I think had the UI re-written) being a lot slower than 6, and me still using version 6 when I could because of this.
In fact, I can remember VS 6 opening in seconds, compared to later versions being much slower.
And it isn't an IDE, rather a programmer's text editor.
William Ralph Inge wrote that in 1931, but it has never been more true than when applied to modern technologies today.
TTY's date back to the Victorian era. AUX cables date back to the XIX century, too.
Most silverware design at home date back to 1800-1900.