That could certainly account for some of the memory usage. I'm still confused about why there would be a 10% cpu usage on one, and not on the browser version (especially if they are equivalent, or even share underlying code).

VS Code certainly is efficient for an Electron app, and I'm sure it's really hard to achieve that level of efficiency. To be honest though, I use it side by side with Visual Studio itself, and on many metrics, it eats its big brother for breakfast (e.g. [1])... and that is a native app. One can argue that it's apples and oranges, and that the two are not equivalent, but we have an interesting counterpoint. While I'm sure performance is heavily weighted in favour of native, it seems like it's certainly surmountable.

[1] https://twitter.com/id_aa_carmack/status/695013979807047680?...

My theory on Slack's ridiculous CPU use is animated graphics. If some of those are on the screen the CPU use is at least 10%.