VS Code is very much a special case and not the least bit representative of the typical Electron app. It benefits from having some of the best talent available working on it and has multiple bits that drop down to lower-level solutions to improve performance, both of which Microsoft is willing to pay for because VS Code entrenches them in the software development world in ways it wouldn’t be otherwise.
> has multiple bits that drop down to lower-level solutions to improve performance
Such as?
> VS Code is very much a special case and not the least bit representative of the typical Electron app.
And Obsidian, and Discord, and Logseq, and Notion, and Figma, and Slack, and Postman, and Insomnia, and so on, and so. Oh wait, so it's not only VS Code?
At minimum it uses ripgrep for file searching, which is written in Rust but I thought I read blog posts about other parts in the past.
> And Obsidian, and Discord, and Logseq, and Notion, and Figma, and Slack, and Postman, and Insomnia, and so on, and so.
Out of the mentions in that list I’ve used, only Obsidian feels comparatively responsive to VS Code. Notion and Slack in particular are slow and can get super bogged down. Discord and Figma sit somewhere in between.
I'm not sure I agree it's "very performant", but nonetheless I do love it. (Compare it to Zed, for example.)
In any event, VS code is only required to render text in a single font, with very few layout concerns, styling, run-level formatting, etc. that require re-flowing across multiple of pages, etc. And each of those is text files measuring in the bytes. Tritium, by contrast, has to hold and operate on PDFs and Word documents each with very complicated layout and rendering logic and measuring in the kbs.
People praising VSCode's performance are probably better defined by having too fast computers than anything else, by all measures VSCode really isn't particularly lightweight nor performant.
VS Code is very much a special case and not the least bit representative of the typical Electron app. It benefits from having some of the best talent available working on it and has multiple bits that drop down to lower-level solutions to improve performance, both of which Microsoft is willing to pay for because VS Code entrenches them in the software development world in ways it wouldn’t be otherwise.
> has multiple bits that drop down to lower-level solutions to improve performance
Such as?
> VS Code is very much a special case and not the least bit representative of the typical Electron app.
And Obsidian, and Discord, and Logseq, and Notion, and Figma, and Slack, and Postman, and Insomnia, and so on, and so. Oh wait, so it's not only VS Code?
> Such as?
At minimum it uses ripgrep for file searching, which is written in Rust but I thought I read blog posts about other parts in the past.
> And Obsidian, and Discord, and Logseq, and Notion, and Figma, and Slack, and Postman, and Insomnia, and so on, and so.
Out of the mentions in that list I’ve used, only Obsidian feels comparatively responsive to VS Code. Notion and Slack in particular are slow and can get super bogged down. Discord and Figma sit somewhere in between.
I'm not sure I agree it's "very performant", but nonetheless I do love it. (Compare it to Zed, for example.)
In any event, VS code is only required to render text in a single font, with very few layout concerns, styling, run-level formatting, etc. that require re-flowing across multiple of pages, etc. And each of those is text files measuring in the bytes. Tritium, by contrast, has to hold and operate on PDFs and Word documents each with very complicated layout and rendering logic and measuring in the kbs.
People praising VSCode's performance are probably better defined by having too fast computers than anything else, by all measures VSCode really isn't particularly lightweight nor performant.
It is definitely not as performant as Word on 5+ year old hardware that can barely run Windows 10, that many companies will happily order tons of.