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0 pointsmorganherlocker5mo ago0 comments

> If you want electron app that doesn't lag terribly

My experience with VS Code is that it has no perceptible lag, except maybe 500ms on startup. I don't doubt people experience this, but I think it comes down to which extensions you enable, and many people enable lots of heavy language extensions of questionable quality. I also use Visual Studio for Windows builds on C++ projects, and it is pretty jank by comparison, both in terms of UI design and resource usage.

I just opened up a relatively small project (my blog repo, which has 175 MB of static content) in both editors and here's the cold start memory usage without opening any files:

- Visual Studio Code: 589.4 MB

- Visual Studio 2022: 732.6 MB

update:

I see a lot of love for Jetbrains in this thread, so I also tried the same test in Android Studio: 1.69 GB!

0 comments

nurumaik5mo ago

I easily notice lag in vscode even without plugins. Especially if using it right after zed. Ngl they made it astonishingly fast for an electron app, but there are physical limits of what can be done in web stack with garbage collected js

skydhash5mo ago

That easily takes the worst designed benchmark in my opinion.

Have you tried Emacs, VIM, Sublime, Notepad++,... Visual Studio and Android Studio are full IDEs, meaning upon launch, they run a whole host of modules and the editor is just a small part of that. IDEs are closer to CAD Software than text editors.

morganherlockerOP5mo ago

- notepad++: 56.4 MB (went gray-window unresponsive for 10 seconds when opening the explorer)

- notepad.exe: 54.3 MB

- emacs: 15.2 MB

- vim: 5.5MB

I would argue that notepad++ is not really comparable to VSCode, and that VSCode is closer to an IDE, especially given the context of this thread. TUIs are not offering a similar GUI app experience, but vim serves as a nice baseline.

I think that when people dump on electron, they are picturing an alternative implementation like win32 or Qt that offers a similar UI-driven experience. I'm using this benchmark, because its the most common critique I read with respect to electron when these are suggested.

It is obviously possible to beat a browser-wrapper with a native implementation. I'm simply observing that this doesn't actually happen in a typical modern C++ GUI app, where the dependency bloat and memory management is often even worse.

Zardoz845mo ago

Try gvim, neovim-qt or any other neovim gui client, before calling vim a "TUI only experience".

Also, emacs is a GUI app since the 90's .

throwaway20375mo ago

I never understand why developers spend so much time complaining about "bloat" in their IDEs. RAM is so incredibly cheap compared to 5/10/15/20 years ago, that the argument has lost steam for me. Each time I install a JetBrains IDE on a new PC, one of the first settings that I change is to increase the max memory footprint to 8GB of RAM.

Dylan168075mo ago

> RAM is so incredibly cheap compared to 5/10/15/20 years ago

Compared to 20 years ago that's true. But most of the improvement happened in the first few years of that range. With the recent price spikes RAM actually costs more today than 10 years ago. If we ignore spikes and buy when the cycle of memory prices is low, DDR3 in 2012 was not much more than the price DDR5 was sitting at for the last two years.

KronisLV5mo ago

> I never understand why developers spend so much time complaining about "bloat" in their IDEs. RAM is so incredibly cheap compared to 5/10/15/20 years ago, that the argument has lost steam for me. Each time I install a JetBrains IDE on a new PC, one of the first settings that I change is to increase the max memory footprint to 8GB of RAM.

I had to do the opposite for some projects at work: when you open about 6-8 instances of the IDE (different projects, front end in WebStorm, back end in IntelliJ IDEA, DB in DataGrip sometimes) then it's easy to run out of RAM. Even without DataGrip, you can run into those issues when you need to run a bunch of services to debug some distributed issue.

Had that issue with 32 GB of RAM on work laptop, in part also cause the services themselves took between 512 MB and 2 GB of memory to run (thanks to Java and Spring/Boot).

skydhash5mo ago

I don’t really complain about bloat in IDEs. They have their uses. But VSCode feature set is a text editor and it’s really bloated for that.

Zardoz845mo ago

I prefer my RAM to being use for fs cache or on other more useful stuff, instead of launching full lobotomized web browsers.

antonvs5mo ago

Anyone saying that Java-based Jetbrains is worse than Electron-based VS Code, in terms of being more lightweight, is living in an alternate universe which can’t be reached by rational means.

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse

0 comments

nurumaik5mo ago

skydhash5mo ago

That easily takes the worst designed benchmark in my opinion.

morganherlockerOP5mo ago

- notepad++: 56.4 MB (went gray-window unresponsive for 10 seconds when opening the explorer)

- notepad.exe: 54.3 MB

- emacs: 15.2 MB

- vim: 5.5MB

Zardoz845mo ago

Try gvim, neovim-qt or any other neovim gui client, before calling vim a "TUI only experience".

Also, emacs is a GUI app since the 90's .

throwaway20375mo ago

Dylan168075mo ago

> RAM is so incredibly cheap compared to 5/10/15/20 years ago

KronisLV5mo ago

Had that issue with 32 GB of RAM on work laptop, in part also cause the services themselves took between 512 MB and 2 GB of memory to run (thanks to Java and Spring/Boot).

skydhash5mo ago

I don’t really complain about bloat in IDEs. They have their uses. But VSCode feature set is a text editor and it’s really bloated for that.

Zardoz845mo ago

I prefer my RAM to being use for fs cache or on other more useful stuff, instead of launching full lobotomized web browsers.

antonvs5mo ago

Anyone saying that Java-based Jetbrains is worse than Electron-based VS Code, in terms of being more lightweight, is living in an alternate universe which can’t be reached by rational means.

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse