If nothing else, Atom was the birthplace of Electron.js and I know it is controversial, but Electron was a boon for the rapid development of cross-platform desktop applications. VS Code was built - in turn - on Electron.

We need people like nathansobo to try out new ideas and directions. I, personally, am very much looking forward to their WebAssembly-based extension system and Zed being the flagship UI application developed in Rust.

Our goal is to build something substantially better than VS Code.

I don't think VS code would ever accept a change to native UI or switch off of electron, so it seems like a nonstarter for someone who wants to experiment with native UI text editors.

VS code is written almost 100% in JS and typescript, it will always be a nodejs app through and through without a complete rewrite. And even if they wanted to rearchitect VS code all of the extension APIs, extensions themselves, etc. would demand the existing nodejs runtime.

So long story short... VS code is a good editor if you want to contribute to a nodejs and web tech based text editor, but not if you want to explore other architectures or ideas.

Not the person you're responding to, but it sounds like they're going in a different direction with Zed in terms of the tech stack, where VSCode is pretty similar to Atom.