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>Now we do the same, but we look at the text editors of 1995 which used 4 MB of RAM as incredibly efficient and well made, paragons of craftsmanship.

That's because the text editors don't exist in a vacuum; the 4MB-RAM text editor would be slow on a 1995 computer but blazingly-fast on a 2024 computer.

VS Code is slow and annoying to use, and RAM is just a more measurable symptom of that.

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I don't care about memory usage for editors as much I care about input latency and responsiveness.

Jetbrains (IDEA IntelliJ, Pycharm, etcetc) put a lot of effort into making their IDE low latency as it was getting to a point of being almost ridiculous. Their editor is built in Java, and they run on their own runtime as they have so many hacks and tweaks to make it work as a desktop app as well (font rendering, etc).

Pavel Fatin has a [great article](https://pavelfatin.com/typing-with-pleasure/) about typing latency and his work around implementing this in IntelliJ, well worth a read.

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