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Comment by minimaxir | Hacker News Reader

For those who think web-based IDEs are inefficient, I recommend giving VS Code in the browser a try: nowadays it's just as performant as it is on the desktop.

Even on the iPad it's just as performant (with 120Hz scrolling!), although as noted in the announcement, the file system limitations make it a bit of a pain to work with for ad hoc coding.

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> For those who think web-based IDEs are inefficient, I recommend giving VS Code in the browser a try: nowadays it's just as performant as it is on the desktop.

This doesn't read to me as the acclaim that you think it is. What I'm hearing is that the desktop application is as slow as a web IDE.

No doubt the people at VSCode have put every effort into making the application run well on desktop, but that's not to say that it comes close to "native".

For another point of reference, I'd say that Discord is "as fast in the web browser as it is on desktop", but that's no compliment; the desktop client is extremely laggy, even on an up-to-date Windows PC. [That said, relatively speaking VSCode is leagues ahead of Discord on this front].

FWIW I've used web-based IDEs for certain bespoke tasks and desktop VS Code is still magnitudes ahead of them in speed/performance.

Performance between IDEs can vary dramatically, so vscode vs (non-vscode) web IDEs is not a useful comparison - especially now that you can compare web vscode vs "native" (electron?) vscode.

I suspect the performance difference is trivial (or soon will be once teething problems are sorted out).

> the desktop application is as slow as a web IDE.

Have you ever used VSCode on the desktop? I have never experienced any issue with VSCode nor have I ever wished it performed better.

I envy you for never having issues with VS Code. I have to restart it far, far too often for it grinding to a halt. I'll lose my auto-complete menus completely. Forget auto-completing any paths (like for imports) when it gets to this state. I have to restart my whole computer sometimes.

I have minimal plugins, but have once again removed some more that I thought were helpful, performance got a little bit better again. But we shall see how long it holds up, as I've done this a couple times now in an attempt to gain reliable performance. This is on basically a brand new 15" i9 Intel MBP.

I'm not the only one I've talked to that has random slow-downs like this. I've literally contemplated going back to Sublime Text 2 for my sanity - I just want things to work reliably. Oh, and if you accidentally click on one of your build files, enjoy the system lock-up!

I don't need new features every month in VS Code that I won't use. I just want better performance on the basics so I can get back to being in flow, writing code, solving problems.

It’s not an especially fair case, but I was surprised at how poorly VSCode ran on a Raspberry Pi 3 when I tried it awhile back. Running it with a remote connection to a beefier machine would make for an amazing thin client.

Have you ever compared it against Notepad++ or Sublime Text?

Geoff here from Gitpod. My primary development machine is an iPad after I bricked my M1 laptop. I’m currently out in the middle of no-where of Australia with my van so I’m all in. Even when I get my M1 fixed I’m likely to keep my thin client device for hipsters as my primary development machine.

See https://ghuntley.com/anywhere for tips and tricks.

Thanks for your link. I can only imagine a future where remote dev work is the new norm. As the rest of society discovers the joys of working from anywhere, such browser-based coding innovations are helpful to on-board new curious developers. We no longer need costly setups/desktops to run very useful software like VSCode.

After seeing this post, I started searching for a cheap and good tablet which led me to a soon-to-be released Android tablet from Nokia (less than 250€). Tablets are trending again! Coupled with other existing affordable solutions like Termux and Git, software development will attract more people regardless of personal background/status/location. We won't be seen as hipsters for long.

I am heading towards making life changes similar to yours (hopefully after Santa delivers his gifts on-time), so I feel grateful that you shared your experience.

> Even on the iPad it's just as performant (with 120Hz scrolling!), although as noted in the announcement, the file system limitations make it a bit of a pain to work with for ad hoc coding.

That's on Apple, because they only allow Safari (or reskinned variants of Safari) on iOS.

There would be no performance difference (at least at the UI layer) between a web app running in the browser and the same web app running in Electron, so this doesn't really demonstrate anything new WRT performance

As mentioned in the release notes, this only works for web languages sadly. And no debugging. In a way, that's not really a complete IDE (though they are probably working on it).

It actually loads way faster for me in Safari than the actual VSCode app. To be fair, Safari is already running when I try this versus a cold boot for VSCode.

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