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Comment by deminature | Hacker News Reader

VS Code is a great success of Electron-based apps but also has massive memory usage and performance bloat that comes with this style of app, see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19144039

Sublime Text is implemented natively (C++) and uses a fraction of the resources to accomplish similar functionality. I know we live in a period of plentiful system resources where RAM usage no longer practically matters, but using 1.5GB RAM for a few files open seems insane, even more so that this is now normalized.

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> Sublime Text is implemented natively (C++) and uses a fraction of the resources to accomplish similar functionality.

If VS Code is slower than sublime with the same level of functionality, why does it currently totally dominate the market? Is it because devs just love Microsoft?

VS Code has a quasi-IDE implemented for a bunch of popular languages including a debugger [1]. Sublime is a straight text editor, with limited debugging capability. Sheer usefulness beats performance, so VS Code won the editor war.

[1] https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/editor/debugging

So in other words, not the same level of functionality.

Importantly, it isn't slower.

It does use a lot more resources, but it turns out that people care a lot less about memory usage than UX speed.

Sublime Text is an independent product from a small developer; VS Code is actively pushed and marketed by Microsoft, one of the biggest, best-known companies in the world.

That may or may not be the primary reason for the difference, but I don't think it can be ignored.

> If VS Code is slower than sublime with the same level of functionality, why does it currently totally dominate the market? Is it because devs just love Microsoft?

Because it only has the same level of functionality when you conveniently ignore how easier it is to write plugins

Sublime Text and VS Code are pretty different, despite looking superficially simmilar. VS Code gets much further along the path to being a full IDE (albeit not completely), where Sublime is more of a pure text editor.

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