My setup is just the official, latest release, with the Microsoft plugin for C++, the Vim bindings everyone uses, and one additional plugin for switching between header and source. I customized nothing besides a few keybindings and enabling neovim mode. This is on Ubuntu by the way.

I also used VS code a little on macOS for web development, and to be fair, I didn’t run into any of these problems there. But that’s for projects that are literally 100 times smaller than the C++ project I’m working on.

I don’t really buy the anecdotal ‘other developers never have any problems with VS code’ observation. I’ve been following the VS code release announcements here on HN for a while (it’s what got me interested in trying VS code), and they regularly seem to contain fixes for weird platform problems or regressions, to the point they’ve even had to retract a few of them because of serious problems found after deploying the update.

Look at the past threads for releases (I wont link, but) they are filled with nothing but praise. I'm totally non-affiliated with VSCode, but switched from Atom a few months ago and yes, anecdotally it's been an amazingly smooth experience.

I am actually the opposite of you: totally thankful for JS and electron, and I think they are the best possible future for apps.

To be honest, I really think people have an emotional reaction to JS/Electron one because it's seen as a threat to their preferred language, and two because it has all this built up hate due to legitimate past problems. A few years of pretty hectic pace in JS-land and now it's close to greatness, but still very inconsistent, so people still love to hate it. Couple that with some poorly made apps (looking at you Spotify/Slack) and you have a weird sect on HN that now vilifies Electron/JS with totally incorrect arguments about stability and speed (both are very doable with modern practices).

I'm not saying you are this person, or your grievances aren't real. But I'd be happy to put some money on the following points:

1. Electron/JS apps will be more prolific in the next 5 years

2. They will also be clearly the best platform for speed, stability and flexibility due to massive and ever improving ecosystems and dev tools.

Both have been happening, and to be honest, today we're at a point where I think it's a no-brainer to choose JS for just about any complex UI. The problem is you're wading into a fast-changing, diverse ecosystem, and a few wrong choices there can be very painful.

> it's a no-brainer to choose JS for just about any complex UI

Javascript? Sure. Electron? Maybe not. Show me an Electron app with load times that aren't measured in seconds. Or an Electron-based text editor that doesn't choke on a moderately sized text file. VS Code is currently taking half a gig of ram on my notebook with three text files open...

I happen to quite like VS Code, but to claim that Electron is a no-brainer is simply false. There are serious tradeoffs.

VS Code doesn't seem to choke to moderately sized files. There is a large amount of non-Electron code used for its text editor.

I am floored at how eloquently you've put every single one of my thoughts on the matter. Seriously, bravo (and thank you because I will inevitably quote you).

Could you elaborate on what you mean by "the vim keybindings acting up"?

It just stops working and I cannot enter any text in the editor area anymore, even though all keyboard shortcuts and the terminal area still work. Enabling/disabling the extension fixes the problem, until it occurs again. I've disabled neovim mode for now, so far this seems to help but time will tell. Interestingly there is at least one bug open in the vscodevim issue tracker for the exact same problem, but it's closed because 'it hasn't been possible to reproduce this for a long time' :-/