I'm between VS17 with Resharper and Ncrunch, VSC, and Sublime Text myself. (VS17 for all my .net stuff, which picked up about 16 months ago). Even with a 4.2ghz 6 core CPU/32/NVME, the formers are slow compared to ST. Sublime is just so instantaneous it never gets old.

Yet VSC is like a polished machine with so much weight behind, it's almost a wonder ST3 can stand up to it. That's why I'd like the 3.0 release to be official.

(Fwiw I used Textpad for over 15 years before finding ST. Compared to Eclipse etc that was another speed demon).

You'd t think with their big team and resources, they would have been able to use a more performant cross platform toolkit, say Qt or maybe some of their .Net stuff.

Why did they choose to base their editor on Electron, of all things, especially considering the existing results of Atom (horrible) is beyond me.

I think the development of VS Code was kind of an accident. They built Monaco (the editor component) for Visual Studio Online, then made it a standalone text editor as a side project and it ended taking off big time.

I'd rather have VSC team have members working on making underlying electron API'S faster. Get it to speed of sublime.

If you compare it to the likes of Brackets and Atom, it was significantly faster than the others at release... I'm not sure what can be done to make significant performance gains... I mean being able to even handle large files (disabling any highlighting/autocomplete, and only displaying portion of the file may be necessary)... as it is, for most of what I've used it for vsc is great.

Electron is essentially Node grafted to Chromium... There are a few things that could be done, but would depend on a lot of upstream cooperation to do so.

Sublime uses skia as its rendering library, which is what blink (chromium frontend) uses for rendering. May be electron can provide a nicer api to interface directly with skia.

By giving performant lower level access to render, may be VSC can move some of the perf sensitive code directly to compiled optimized binaries.

Sort of like what node native libraries do.

Sublime does some pretty great dark magic. I was impressed to see vscode approach similar speeds to sublime in search. I believe there is plenty that can be done to make rendering fast, reduce memory consumption and make it a bit light weight. But it would require access to metal APIs

VSCode's plugin model is pretty impressive and tends to isolate the side effects of poorly performing plugins (including language/autocomplete, etc)... so that the main editor tends to be responsive. There should be room to tweak, but I'm pretty happy overall. Way better experience than any full IDE I've tried... I only hope they keep it that way as features come in.

Also, as an Electron app, there is a node element, so compiled components are already an option.

They went that way because of TypeScript I suppose. And in the end VSC is great marketing for successful open source JS/TS project.

It is an example that all the gazillion dollars and huge number of s/w engineers will not automatically do the right thing just because it is right. Most likely they will hop on the bandwagon, add cool words to their quickly concocted webapp masquerading as powerful editor.

In addition 1M+ plugins, open-source, cross-platform etc will keep cool kids not just happy but they will also aggressively challenge whoever is using old but efficient software products.

I agree - you can pry sublime text from my cold, dead hands. VSC/Atom/whatever is way too slow for every day use

I tried to switch to VSC the other day but its insane. I have a Surface Pro 3 and it was so slow to edit an 80 line Golang file (With the go plugin). I just cant use a text editor like that to get anything done. Like scrolling lagged, keystrokes lagged. Meanwhile with Sublime and GoSublime on the same laptop there is zero lag.