Atom and VSCode are in different leagues with respect to performance, and the difference is growing with time. If you think the reason that Atom is slow is because of Electron, VSCode is the counterexample.

If VSCode isn't slow because of electron, what's the reason it's slow?

VSCode isn't slow. Atom is slow.

Since both are written with electron the difference must obviously be the actual implementation, not the platform itself.

Keep in mind VSCode was written by Microsoft who have decades of experience writing IDEs and text editors, whereas Atom was written by GitHub who are mostly working on the GitHub product.

> VSCode isn't slow. Atom is slow.

Could have fooled me.

VScode runs like a dream on my hexacore/8GB/SSD desktop, but brings my atom/2GB/32GBeMMC based Asus Eeebook X205TA to its knees. Native programs for low power systems seems sound practice to me.

I first tried switching to Atom around 1.0 and it was a horrible mess.

I just switched to VSCode last month and it's been as nice to use as ST3 (actually even nicer because ST3 didn't have any code intelligence).

I've also used IntelliJ (or rather WebStorm) several times over the years and it always felt too sluggish and obnoxious.

For the record: I'm on Linux and have 32 gigs of RAM. So maybe I have lower standards for memory use and performance.