Comment by niftich | Hacker News Reader

Comment by niftich | Hacker News Reader

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This point gets brought up a lot, and the criticism is fair, but only to a point. Atom's primary innovation is being built with HTML, JS, and CSS, and running on top of Electron that's running on top of Chromium. This design makes its internals approachable for a large audience. For lack of a better term, it's a first-party tech demo for Electron.

At this layer, you're pretty far from bare metal, and it's nice that it works as well as it does. In the future, I believe the need for so many layers will be lessened, when native script hosts and renderers can be leveraged, API calls shimmed between platforms, when packaging full Chromium is no longer necessary. Therefore I fully expect Atom to get better, both on the below-Electron side as native platforms evolve [1], and above, through optimizations.

For me, it's about expectation management. I expect Atom to be a proper text editor, but not necessarily a performant one yet, because I know how it's built.

[1] https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/uwp/get-started/cre...

>> Atom's primary innovation

They couldn't make it fast on modern hardware?

It's a significant indictment of the technology, and of GitHub's engineering that a product like Atom is slow on th high-end Dell hardware that my employer buys for me.

Atom's problem, which includes the astoundingly enormous amount of CPU and memory that it guzzles, is that the people who built it demonstrably didn't care about performance, didn't know better, or both.

Atom is a textbook example of how not to write software. I guess it's not only 'hackable to the core', but 'inefficient to the core'.

It's just bad software.

> It's a significant indictment of the technology

Yes, it is; much more so an indictment of the stack than Atom itself.

> didn't care about performance

Perhaps; I can see why they would prioritize features over performance.

> Atom is just a textbook example of how not to write software.

I disagree. I very much feel that Atom is about demonstrating an archetypal 'desktop application', like a text editor, in Electron. And Electron is about coding in HTML/JS/CSS, albeit currently it's backed by a entire shrinkwrapped Chromium, which means you're essentially stuck inside a particular browser and inherit all of its performance characteristics.

It's the Electron stack that must prove that it's viable in the long-term, but it's possible that Atom will catch a lot of the flak instead.

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