Hacker News Reader

How is it that Microsoft's Electron apps are so snappy and performant? You would never know Visual Studio Code was Electron by how it performs. I'm not a user of their cloud apps, but are they similarly snappy, or is it just that Microsoft's Dev Tools team is way out in front?

View on HN

Performance is a priority for VSC. Same with Azure's console. Same with sites like Stackoverflow.

It's not a priority with many of Google's current apps.

Which is a problem with the dev environment. If it takes a lot of effort to make an application performant then most of the applications written in that environment will be slow.

It isn't so much about environment as it is experience. It is incredibly easy to bring in libraries and components that bring the entire jungle for want of a banana. Especially graphing/charting libraries. It's also about focus, the focus is on the feature not the performance/feel.

VSC dev here. Correct, perf is a priority for us and it's no black magic. A simple one is to keep your bundles small. VSC's main bundle is less than 9MB, Cloud UI seems to be 15.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com