Comment by Cthulhu_

4 days ago

VS Code defers a lot of tasks to the background at least. This is a bit more visible in intellij; you seem to measure how long it takes to show its window, but how long does it take for it to warm up and finish indexing / loading everything, or before it actually becomes responsive?

Anyway, five seconds is long for a text editor; 10, 15 years ago, sublime text loaded and opened up a file in <1 second, and it still does today. Vim and co are instant.

Also keep in mind that desktop computers haven't gotten significantly faster for tasks like opening applications in the past years; they're more efficient (especially the M line CPUs) and have more hardware for specialist workloads like what they call AI nowadays, but not much innovation in application loading.

You use a lot of words like "pretty close to", "nearly", "essentially", but 10, 20 years ago they WERE instant; applications from 10, 20 years ago should be so much faster today than they were on hardware from back then.

I wish the big desktop app builders would invest in native applications. I understand why they go for web technology (it's the crossplatform GUI technology that Java and co promised and offers the most advanced styling of anything anywhere ever), but I wish they invested in it to bring it up to date.

10 comments

Cthulhu_

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rtkwe  4 days ago

Sublime Text isn't an IDE though so comparing it to VS Code is comparing grapes and apples. VS Code is doing a lot more.

  • maccard  4 days ago

    I disagree. Vs code uses plugins for all its heavy lifting. Even a minimal plugin setup is substantially slower to load than sublime is, which can also have an LSP plugin.

  • makapuf  3 days ago

    VScode isn't an IDE either, visual studio is one. After that it all depends what plugins you loaded in both of them.

_Algernon_  4 days ago

>Anyway, five seconds is long for a text editor; 10, 15 years ago, sublime text loaded and opened up a file in <1 second, and it still does today. Vim and co are instant.

Do any of those do the indexing that cause the slowness? If not it's comparing apples to oranges.

  • maccard  4 days ago

    Riders startup time isn’t including indexing. Indexing my entire project takes minutes but it does it in the background.

maccard  3 days ago

> You use a lot of words like "pretty close to", "nearly", "essentially", but 10, 20 years ago they WERE instant; applications from 10, 20 years ago should be so much faster today than they were on hardware from back then.

11 years ago I put in a ticket to slack asking them about their resource usage. Their desktop app was using more memory than my IDE and compilers and causing heap space issues with visual studio. 10 years ago things were exactly the same. 15 years ago, my coworkers were complaining that VS2010 was a resource hog compared to 10 years ago. My memory of loading photoshop in the early 2000’s was that it took absolutely forever and was slow as molasses on my home PC.

I don’t think it’s necessarily gotten worse, I think it’s always been pathetically bad.