Hacker News Reader

LLVM is bounded by what its IR can express, and what it can express is constrained by what is portable and what it can prove. There is a reason `ffmpeg`, OpenSSL, OpenBLAS, glibc's string routines, LuaJIT's interpreter, etc. all still leverage hand-written assembly.

As for the editor, even if it isn't necessarily optimal assembly (I have no clue), a reduced feature set and relying on OS APIs instead of frameworks will still probably result in something which feels faster than Electron programs like VSCode.

It should be more performant if actually handwritten I guess. But just lowering the implementation like this will make it faster than many other apps seemingly for free, but not having the abstractions from e.g. C or C++ will likely make it unmaintainable long term.

> Particularly when the "handwritten" code in question is vibecoded, like this is

Also, “For Apple silicon, a build-time translator converts that core to AArch64” likely doesn’t help the quality of the ARM code.