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Comment by hartror | Hacker News Reader

The best comment is batjko's about how Atom is stuck in no mans land between text editor and IDE. One you expect to open near instantly, the other you'd forgive for a few minutes of loading.

https://github.com/atom/atom/issues/2654#issuecomment-501372...

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> the other you'd forgive for a few minutes of loading.

No I wouldn't. What features do IDEs have which makes "a few minutes" a forgivable startup time (which I'll arbitrarily define as "time until key presses cause characters to show up on screen")

Especially in a world where Web apps are "slow" if they take a few seconds to load, and a bunch of work is going into replacing OS init systems to get their boot times under 10 seconds.

I didn't forgive Eclipse and Netbeans for their slugishness and bloat (they're the only programs I've seen with progress bars for exiting!). I've since switched to Emacs, which straddles the divide between text-editor, IDE and operating system.

Even loaded with extensions, written in LISP, running in a single thread, it loads in a few seconds.

Yea a few minutes is ridiculous. IntelliJ takes max 30s for me to start and it's pretty heavy, I can't imagine waiting more than a whole minute. That's just unacceptable.

Not to sound like a plug for Jetbrains, but for everything IntelliJ does, I find it incredible that it loads so quickly, and the experience is pretty much fluid. VS2008-2013, Eclipse, Netbeans, Qt Creator and others all seem like pigs compared to IntelliJ. The thing that really blew me away and made me a true convert was the jruby+ruby support, and the jruby step-through debugger

I don't know, VS loads pretty quickly and is generally fluid, though it has its shortcomings. Eclipse on the other hand starts up the same way it behaves: slowly. It's much more full-featured than VS or Qt Creator though (at least last time I tried it).

IntelliJ probably manages to do a lot more stuff in the background than its competitors do. I'd argue that concurrency / asynchronicity in large Java applications like that is very complicated, moreso than Javascript-based applications like Atom - so props to Jetbrains for that.

I think his point is that if you were the type of developer who uses an IDE, you are willing to accept the slow start up time. You clearly are not willing to deal with that, and as such are not ever going to be happy.

Some tools take a while to warm up, use them or don't.

I am the type of developer who uses an IDE. The problem is that I would usually get my work done in Vim while waiting for the IDE to load. After a few instances of finding myself working in Vim with Eclipse loaded and idle in the background, I just stopped opening Eclipse altogether.

As a regular IDE user (Visual Studio, PyCharm, WebStorm) there is no way I would forgive a few minutes loading time. Of the IDEs I use PyCharm is the slowest at perhaps 15-20 seconds to start up, and I consider that barely acceptable. Had it not been such a great product once started up I doubt I'd be as forgiving about its start up time as I am.

> You clearly are not willing to deal with that, and as such are not ever going to be happy.

I'm pretty happy in Emacs. I'm not happy with false dichotomies, like this features/speed tradeoff. There is a real tradeoff to be made between those, but nowhere near the level I've seen in IDEs.

Many problems seem to depend on the way modules/extensions are implemented.

For example, we could implement plugins by allowing event listeners which can run arbitrary, imperative code. However, this leads to redundant computation (multiple "get(foo);" and "set(foo, bar)" calls spread across listeners), increases the chance of plugins conflicting due to race conditions, requiring very conservative scheduling, etc.

An alternative, like a hook/advice system, would have the core performing gets/sets exactly when they're needed, but give plugins the ability to override the return values using hooks (like a dynamic form of decorators). This avoids the redundancy, race conditions and scheduling issues.

But comparing it to Textmate and Sublime is entirely fair, and both of those (as per the comments in the thread) are faster.

Agreed. Atom seems intended to be a drop-in replacement for Sublime. I tried it out again a week or so ago and found it almost at parity. The speed issue mentioned here is one of the biggest reasons I went back to the closed-source Sublime.

The speed, and the text rendering for me. Sublime renders the fonts I use better, and it supports bitmap fonts, which I am still fond of.

I don't use Atom so I can't compare directly, but from those comments even Xcode sounds faster.

Even though I am a sublime user for some tasks I still use Visual Studio. I have to say that Visual Studio actually has a very fast start-up time -- thus it is a bit of a myth that IDEs have to start slow.

I just ran 2008 and 2012 and the second time they load (I prewarmed the caches), they load in about 1 second. With a cold cache 2008 takes 2 seconds although 2012 seems to take 15 seconds (which is slow.)

(Tested on a fairly high end machine, you results may differ.)

I opened 2012 and 2013 and they're almost instant on my machine(high end machine). Opening my main solution for work is roughly 3minutes on same machine, which would be nice if it could be done faster, but that's not going to happen I suppose.

Whoa, 3 minutes? Is that also from an SSD? Our primary C++ solution in VS (CMake generated) has 35 projects and somewhere between 500 to 1000 source files and it only takes about 10 seconds to open.

I completely agree, atom takes about 2s to open on my machine and it drives me insane. IntelliJ on the other hand takes about 15-30s, depending on the size of the project, to open and it doesn't bother me at all. Maybe because IntelliJ in my mind is a full fledged IDE and atom is not, it also has a splash screen which helps in my opinion.

EDIT:

I'm on a brand new macbook pro with 16gb ram and a 512gb ssd and it takes 2 seconds. It takes about 10 seconds on my old chromebook.

I would check into that startup time for Intellij -- I am similarly on a brand new macbook pro (16gb ram, ssd) and my largest project takes a few seconds tops. Only the maven auto-importer has ever slowed me down to ~10 seconds, but by then the editor was fully loaded.

OK I see your edit now

IntelliJ, VS and even Eclipse load in under 5s.

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