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> built on top of a fairly slow interpreted language

Correction: built on top of a bytecode-compiled language that, few years ago, became a native-compiled language (both AOT and JIT) - initially as an experiment/optional feature, and as of ~5 months ago, this has been merged into the main repo branch.

Of course, I'm an happy user of native-comp as well. Still for most of its history emacs got by with a not exactly state of the art interpreter.

emacs also has the advantage of 40 years of existence, and perhaps most importantly for performance: the ability (requirement?) to choose exactly what functionality you want to load.

VSCode did more in a few years than emacs did in 40 years.