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Comment by styfle | Hacker News Reader

What if all the features of an IDE existed for online coding tools? I actually maintain a list of these tools[0] and several of them are very close to the native experience.

In particular, CodeSandbox has come a long way by basically running VS Code in the browser.

[0]: https://github.com/styfle/awesome-online-ide

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They still would not be nearly as fast. When I'm working with projects consisting of hundreds of files measuring hundreds of lines each, I need an IDE that's capable of using the full performance of my workstation

That's true, especially for client-side based online IDEs. At Repl.it we have a hybrid approach where a lot of the IDE-like functions like code intellisense run on the server: https://repl.it/blog/intel

A counter-argument to this is that all files you need are stored in 'the cloud' and performing searches/indexing/refactoring would happen _faster_ than on your workstation because it can take advantage of a lot more 'cloud' resources.

My work computer is 8 cores, 32gb and a GPU; why do you imagine that a hosted instance somewhere running the web server is going to do a better or faster job than my local computer? Hell, even my laptop is going to do a better job than a cloud server.

Not 'a hosted instance' or 'a cloud server', but many. An arbitrary amount. Personal anecdote: Local full builds for me take 28-30 minutes. When I farm it out to our infrastructure in AWS it takes 9 minutes.

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