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Comment by ThouYS | Hacker News Reader

"written in node.js" - insert squidward packing his chair meme

Lazy take. Node.js is fast, mature, and gives you an in-built editor scripting language for free.

...I mean it's not my favourite, but acting like that's some kind of massive barrier to users of a CLI editor is an overreaction.

The Node ecosystem has caused me nothing but pain, is large and memory-intensive, and Doesn't come stock with the distros I use, requiring much manual configuration. I too will be avoiding this editor, whatever its merits, due to JabbaScript.

I run it on alpine linux with no issues. What distro doesn't have in the repos?

I mean fair enough if you don't like it. But it's nothing if not easy to run.

I meant that it's not preinstalled in the distros I use, not that it's unavailable. Each time I try and bite the bullet and get over myself to try and use a Node app, I end up having to deal with not having the right version of Node as well as have to deal with a litany of stupid, outdated, and insecure library dependencies. They're just not worth my sanity.

Planning to minimize npm dependencies on this one. As for node version, debian 12 ships with node 18, which means there's someone planning to do a true LTS of a node major version... for once. Wishing them luck on that!

Hey, your mileage will vary! My workday includes Node.js being present on basically everything, so it's not overhead for me. (As others have pointed out it's also not that heavy a thing to have around, especially compared to Electron)

It's absolutely overhead on your poor cpu though

I... guess? Compared to an editor written in Rust? Sure? But how much CPU will an editor really consume?

As with most things outside of tight loops in games, good architectural decisions are going to matter a lot more than language choice. Premature optimization is the root of all evil, but if I see that the algorithm is inefficient in practice I'll change the algorithm.

> But how much CPU will an editor really consume?

Ah, you've never had the pleasure of using Emacs I see.

As an Emacs user, a lot more than you'd think.

VIM but particularly Emacs can get painfully slow on semi-large files (and forget about it if you have very long lines) and you have to tweak or disable lots of features if you want them to be reactive and not peg your CPU.

So I think it's more down to the implementation than the language it's written in. V8 is really efficient at running JS, what slows it down is the 25 levels of abstraction and indirection that is usually added on top of it. OP claims to try to reduce that, so maybe give it a chance?

What makes them slow is syntax highlighting. It’s impossible to solve well without making the highlighting mechanism really basic.

Tree Sitter is a significant improvement though.

These are the same kind of people criticizing the Java bunch some time ago.

How times change.

That's a 40mb runtime that's probably already on your system

Not in my netbook.

Think the other poster has a point. You probably do have node on your desktop but it’s not guaranteed to be on a server where terminal editors shine

If it was Ruby or Python or Perl, would you say the same?

For a text editor? Without a doubt.

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