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Comment by Peanuts99 | Hacker News Reader

VS Code is a perfectly fine and pretty performant app.

No it isn't. It takes over 1 GB of memory just to open up a handful of source code files that each are under 1 MB in size (and which, for reference, Sublime can open with 300 MB used). It's an absolute pig.

Erich Gamma started VS Code (through Monaco). That's saying a lot about Erich Gamma and not a lot about Electron.

It's also had a ton of work done to make it performant. (Microsoft level resources)

Isn't Gamma one of the GoF guys who pushed bloated Design Patterns, UML & co? I would never expect him to write performant code.

Also, first time I'm hearing about Monaco. I thought VSCode was an Atom fork.

> Also, first time I'm hearing about Monaco. I thought VSCode was an Atom fork.

The text editor was based on Monaco, a Microsoft product. VS Code only borrowed Atom's multi-platform bundling technology (it was called Atom Shell back then, then renamed to Electron).

It has seen (major) optimization work, and it's still quite memory-heavy, although that's probably fine for a rich IDE. But it's not fine for many other apps.

VSCode is absolutely not a rich IDE. It's a fancy text editor will extra plugins. Visual studio or IDEA are rich IDEs.

With extensions it can be. And if it would be built on a custom GUI framework, it could not.

Rich IDE is not something you achieve by slapping a few extensions on an editor. It's in the name - Integrated. It means that there's a GUI designer which is aware of local classes, inspector at runtime which can jump into the right areas of code, performance analysis that gets populated during runs, highlighting and compilation that's aware of the currently selected configuration, etc. There's an extension a few of those, but they're mostly independent and isolated.

Codeblocks is an IDE. VSCode is pretty much on par in terms of features.

At least comparing to Eclipse in terms of Java support, VSCode is still way behind. I've been using it almost exclusively for maybe a year, since I was mostly working on JS and Groovy code, but now went back doing Java dev on Eclipse, and it is a significant difference.

It's a spectrum. I'd give codeblocks 25% of an IDE ;) But it will depend heavily on what you expect.

Just compare Sidex (VS Code clone in Rust) vs vanilla VS Code.

https://github.com/Sidenai/sidex

but it's built with Tauri, which is simply Electron but using the OS's webview instead of an included browser. It's still not a native GUI.

You mean the app built by a trillion dollar company with a dedicated team spending untold millions of hours making it work?

Wrong, it only performs half way decently thanks to the amount of C++ and Rust extensions it makes use of.

I keep hearing this, but I never see any evidence for it.

There's only 0.7% Rust code and not even any C++. And almost all of that Rust code is for the CLI, not the editor.

The rest is just plain TypeScript and other web technologies.

Missing the extensions that are required to make a bare bones VSCode actually usable.

Also the performance improvements on the bultin terminal thanks to using WebGL as if it was a native app.

Probably at the edge of being a good example. I recently switched to zed because of how bloated VS Code is becoming. I think it gained it’s momentum by being small, but enshitification seems to come for all software.

Based on the hype I tried zed thinking it would feel amazing compared to vscode, and it just didn't.