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Comment by ythl | Hacker News Reader

Yeah my PC is not fast enough to run atom without lag, but it runs sublime perfectly. Maybe when I get the latest i7 I will try out Atom again.

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It should not take an i7 processor to run a text editor. I mean no disrespect, but either something is very wrong with your computer, or something is very wrong with this software.

In this case, you can blame the software without any doubt

It's the original Electron[1] app. It's just a JavaScript web application running in a re-branded Chrome window, which is why it uses an absurd amount of computing power compared to a normal text editor (or most other native applications).

[1] http://electron.atom.io/

Do they at least render natively, or do they rely on Blink + (I'm assuming) some crazy JS text rendering & syntax coloring to get it usable?

The latter.

For years and years it took a very powerful computer to get decent performance out of Emacs.

Emacs only seems speedy now because computers have finally caught up.

Either Atom will get faster, or it will add so much value it's okay being slow.

And then computers will eventually catch up, just like they did with Emacs.

I said this elsewhere but vscode's strategy won me over atom's. Vscode was faster and more stable with much less features which they gradually added over time. Atom had all the features, more lag, and has been trying to polish them since.

Texteditors must be fast and predictable. Tab support for vscode was it for me. Also, their ide must add overhead and yet still much faster than atom

Is Atom the perfect example of "it's 2016 and my computer has multiple cores but stuff is still slow!"?

Well, JavaScript is single threaded...

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