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Comment by LeanderK | Hacker News Reader

vscode launches very fast for me and is in general quite snappy

vscode is the best-case scenario for Electron in my experience; this suggests that you need good diligence to ensure reasonable performance with the framework. Even then, performance is only acceptable, not exceptional.

Sublime Text is a great example of what performance can be like with a different toolkit. Compare it to vscode - even on a fast machine - and you'll start to notice all the little lags that can creep in.

hm but is it comparable? I've used sublime in the past but only as a bare-bones editor. I see vscode more in line with IDEs (it's kinda both), as there ist a lot of functionality and coding support available. Pycharm, Intellij etc are all clunkier in my experience and that's how I mostly use vscode.

The problem with electron software is it has to be fast for lot of people with varied age of computers and not just for those who upgrade machines every couple of years. Currently it is not happening and it is fast on my computer are unhelpful comments.

Is whining about Electron somehow helpful though? It's complained about constantly and the conversation inevitably goes through the exact same discussion points for the 8th or 9th year running.

I am using a mid-2014 Macbook pro. It's not a recent laptop and vscode is still snappy for me.

Ok. A text editor can load fast. Welcome to the 1980’s.

that's great for 1980's editors, feel free to use them. But vscode is a different beast, a plug-and-play solution ranging from simple editor to a full blown IDE. It also stays snappy for me, as mentioned.

“a plug-and-play solution ranging from simple editor to a full blown IDE”

It’s still mainly just a text editor and not “full-blown”. There is no significant built-in user interface, gui designer/builders, or emulators for example. The plugins can be native, which could allow for this. Essentially, vscode is a text editor that allows for native plugins, which explains the high performance possible.

talking about vscode without its plugins or langue servers does not make sense. They provide 99% of the functionality. The plugins can create new views, from pdf-viewers to interactive coding environments with 3d plots ala plotly. Done in electron. The python language server provides all you can think of with python.

Emulators are not native to IDEs, there's always glue code, you can write a plugin for it. I don't know about GUI-Builders, but in principle you can do anything. It's just a web view after all. Vscode is incredibly flexible. I have written a paper with it including live preview of the pdf. But I don't care about GUI-Builders. You only need them for apps and then you are stuck with each walled garden anyway and forced to use e.g. Xcode. Except ios/android apps, who's native anyway in the 21st century? ;)

That is really awesome. But OP and parent talk about Microsoft Teams.

Both are electron apps. I think the parent poster meant just to say "Here's an example of an Electron app that's quick, I'm not sure that Electron itself is the issue"

They said Electron apps. The person is just noting that not all Electron apps run like garbage.

I believe the relevance comes from the fact that both are built on Electron.

VSCode uses Electron, making it entirely relevant to this thread.

OP talks about Electron, which vscode uses.

The issue is in the application architecture, not the platform architecture.

VSCode uses raw TS with no frameworks and all handcrafted events (manually attaching and detaching dom event listeners is commonplace, and hand wiring each event’s propagation chain is as well), Teams hops to the current flavor of the week framework when they get too far up a tree with the last rewrite’s.

VSCode has also never been rewritten from the ground up, whereas this is Teams’ fourth or fifth time by my count.

VSCode also has about 50 people on it, all said and done (PM, Design, etc included), teams has well over a thousand.

It’s really quite an interesting case study. The lesson being, IMO: stop worrying about electron vs native vs angular vs rust vs react vs blah blah blah and just:

- don’t be afraid to write good code

- profile often

And yet, VSCode cannot render at 60 FPS on my 2013 laptop. Any other program does. I don't expect Teams to perform better.

Electron is a waste of resources. A high price to pay for the convenience of easy multiplatform applications.

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