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Comment by acdha | Hacker News Reader

> VSCode is an inferior product in many respects, like speed and resource usage

This is a rote complaint but how often do you really notice it? Even on my ancient spare 2010 MacBook Air, VSC is responsive and it uses less RAM than other apps like Teams or Skype, or simply loading Gmail in Chrome. Yes, vim uses less RAM but it also has like 5% of the functionality.

Is it possible that this is specific to particular plugins or languages? I mostly use Python, JavaScript, Terraform, and Rust but I did notice that Java is, as always, a lot more demanding.

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> Even on my ancient spare 2010 MacBook Air, VSC is responsive and it uses less RAM than other apps like Teams or Skype, or simply loading Gmail in Chrome. Yes, vim uses less RAM but it also has like 5% of the functionality.

Well, you specifically picked the most heavyweight experiences. The comparison was obviously against native text editors.

I was just pointing out that VSC is pretty far down the list of things where performance is something I notice unless I'm trying to do a benchmark of some sort. It's not quite as fast as, say, TextMate 2 was but it's pretty close on basic performance (e.g. when I measured keyboard-display latency it was within 20% of Text Edit or Terminal) and at some point the huge amount of additional functionality is a consideration. If the question is “what things slow me down at work”, it's close to the bottom of the list.

The place I notice it most is when launching it. I don't keep it open all day, I open it periodically to work on this or that and close it when done.

Opening it feels like it takes forever (5-10s) compared to something like Sublime Text (<1s) and when there are a lot of launches throughout the day, that adds up.

It takes about a second on my M1, which puts it below the threshold I have for caring about it. The big question is whether you count things like indexing projects against the editor or the toolchain, since things like firing up linters or the JVM is only partially under their control.

VSCode is basically the poster child for electron apps. But yes, it's still pretty heavy. If you have a lot of projects open it gets heavier.

It is well optimized for what it is though, so the tradeoff of performance for functionality generally isn't a question.

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