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Comment by mrcwinn | Hacker News Reader

Nope, completely wrong. I have a 32GB i7-4790K at around 4Ghz or so, and Atom is a complete dog. The painful truth is that a webview is never going to beat a native app at this kind of task.

It's not a vocal minority. Atom is painful to use compared to, say, Sublime.

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I suspect that both are right. Some people are having issues and others are not. I don't seem to have any lag at all when typing even with multi megabyte size files. Maybe you could give some more details into exactly what actions were slow for you and what types of files you were editing.

Actually, thanks to innovations in Mozilla's servo, the web may actually become faster than native.

Speak for yourself. I haven't had any performance problems with Atom for quite some time with similar hardware.

You expect me to believe that with those specs Atom really runs like a 'complete dog'? The fact you also mention Sublime too really just tells me that your opinion was biased from the start. Finally, JIT compiled languages can be just as fast as native, simply because they can optimise to your hardware specs. You are getting mixed up as to why things are the way they are; JavaScript is a dynamically typed language, so the engine doesn't know AOT what types have what members, so this can cause a slow down compared to statically typed languages. BUT any JavaScript engine worth it's salt quickly figures the stuff out on startup so it's not a problem, as long as you don't use too many dynamic tricks that it can't optimise.

You should believe them and others on here. Atom is slow. No way around it.

If you or others say that it's fine, then you're suffering from Stockholm syndrome, having been taken in to the cult of Atom.

Did you not read my original post? I only just downloaded Atom for the first time.

Seems to me like you're suffering from "I can't replicate it therefore it does not exist and everybody else is either lying to me or a complete idiot."

You haven't actually called anyone out as liars or idiots, but your lack of belief of what they are communicating to you and the tone (from what I can gather) of your responses speaks for itself (whether or not that was your actual intention).

So, no "real world" assortment of plugins for today's multilingual developer? Is that a valid assumption?

I'm just starting to use it today on a large code base, and it's been fine. Only have vim and go-plus plugins installed. I would guess plugins are what's slowing most.

>If you or others say that it's fine, then you're suffering from Stockholm syndrome, having been taken in to the cult of Atom.

Can we please stop accusing each other of malicious intent? I can't believe there are people on both sides of this argument that can't see that the other could have a different experience.

Broad statements like that make you sound like another editor's fanboy.

I don't think it's a JIT vs native issue, it's more likely from native UI components vs DOM. I'm sure JS as a language is plenty fast enough, but the DOM adds overhead that kills that. But this is just speculation on my part as I've barely tried Atom.

For the record, I have the same CPU as him but with 16GB of RAM and Atom is obnoxiously slow for me.

Never used Sublime, but I am biased towards Vim ;-)

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