I actually avoid using VSCode for a number of reasons, one of which is its performance. My performance issues with VSCode are I think not necessarily all related to the fact that it's an electron app, but probably some of them are.

In any case, what I personally find more problematic than just slowness is electron apps interacting weirdly with my Nvidia linux graphics drivers, in such a way that it causes the app to display nothing or display weird artifacts or crash with hard-to-debug error messages. It's possible that this is actually Nvidia's fault for having shitty drivers, I'm not sure; but in any case I definitely notice it more often with electron apps than native ones.

Anyway one of the things I hope that AI can do is make it easier for people to write apps that use the native graphics stack instead of electron.

VSCode isn't a regular Electron crap application, in fact Microsoft has dozens of out-of-process plugins written in C++, Rust and C# to work around Electron crap issues, also the in-editor terminal makes use of WebGL instead of div and p soup.

You might try giving an example of a complex UI that isn't a frustratingly slow resource hog next time you're posting this rant.

> While there are legitimate/measurable performance and resource issues to discuss regarding Electron, this kind of hyperbole just doesn't help.

From the person you're responding to:

> I would guess a moderate amount of performance engineering effort could solve the problem without switching stacks or a major rewrite.

Pretty clearly they're not saying that this is a necessary property of Electron.

Using the terminal in vscode will easily bring the UI to a dead stop. iterm is smooth as butter with multiple tabs and 100k+ lines of scrollback buffer.

Try enabling 10k lines of scrollback buffer in vscode and print 20k lines.

You think VSCode’s ui is more complicated than eg Microsoft Excel? Or am I misunderstanding?

I'm not sure what you're responding to. What I'm describing is my actual experience using Claude, and what I'm hoping for is that they'll spend something like two engineers for a quarter making the app more pleasant to use.

Setting that aside, I think you learned the wrong lesson here. There's no fight. Performance comes from app architecture engineering more than the underlying tools. Building on the trash fire that is the current JS ecosystem may make it harder, true, but apps like VS Code, Discord, Slack, etc show that with enough effort a team can use those tools to deliver something with relatively much better performance. The underlying browser engines are quite sophisticated and very efficient for what they are asked to do, it's just a question of good engineering on top of that. Based on the observable behavior I'm guessing the Claude app is doing something like triggering reflow for the entire chat thread every time they append a few characters to the chat. Totally avoidable.

The big reason web tech is ubiquitous is it has the best properties for distribution. That may last a little while or a long time, but there is no fundamental reason why it's more durable than say Win32 and MFC.