Comment by shawn_w
5 days ago
>... if I compiled while emacs was running, the system would page like crazy
The good old days when "eight megs and constantly swapping" was a real issue. I kind of miss them. (But not the modem speeds. Don't miss those at all.)
Now we have EGACS, which is called Electron, and soon ETACS, which will be called something ending with GPT.
That Electron is a acceptable way to write desktop applications is a big reason I miss those old days.
I go back and forth on this all the time. Generally, I consider applications in browsers an example of the inner-platform effect because I believe native applications are typically better (faster, resource efficient, more consistent UI).
On the other hand, look at ChromeOS: a (previously) successful operating system based on the idea that nearly everything can be implemented in the browser. Microsoft even toyed with this a long time ago, when they made ActiveX controls and integrated Internet Explorer into the desktop. The browser provides a number of security benefits, and allows remote applications (Visual Studio code can be run in the browser, although it looks like the terminal doesn't work, which is a huge probelm).
Personally, I find VS Code's performance to be fine on extremely fast machines, and tolerable on slow machines, but I also think that a truly native VS Code (probably based on Qt) would be 100X better.
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