Xray – An experimental next-generation Electron-based text editor

Re:Xray – An experimental next-generation Electron-based tex... by nine_k on Monday March 05, 2018 @11:08PM (#16526789)

The v8 engine behind Atom is an incredibly efficient compiler, a just-in-time compiler. Without it, all current JS interfaces would be comically slow.

The problem with JS is that its execution model is built around highly dynamic features that are hard to compile efficiently. It also lacks a nice type system, though Typescript helps a lot.

The problem with Atom performance, I suspect, is mostly with its using a web browser and DOM to exit text. I bet that elisp is seriously slower than JS on v8, but Emacs is faster than Atom, because its presentation layer is more efficient (while less capable).

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Re:Xray – An experimental next-generation Electron-based tex... by rattray on Tuesday March 06, 2018 @12:45AM (#16527113)

Hmm, VSCode uses a web browser (and I think also the DOM) to display/edit text, and I find it to be perfectly snappy (Atom was unusably slow on my work codebase).

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Re:Xray – An experimental next-generation Electron-based tex... by JPKab on Tuesday March 06, 2018 @08:52AM (#16528820)

GitHub doesn't do desktop software. Msft does. I'm assuming that is a big reason why they have a big performance boost.

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Re:Xray – An experimental next-generation Electron-based tex... by maximilianroos on Wednesday March 07, 2018 @02:53PM (#16539257)

VSCode uses a Canvas layer, which allows it to skip some of the steps that slow down Atom's rendering

https://code.visualstudio.com/blogs/2017/10/03/terminal-rend...

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Re:Xray – An experimental next-generation Electron-based tex... by petre on Tuesday March 06, 2018 @12:01AM (#16526977)

Most of them are slower. Luajit is the only dynamic language runtime that's faster than V8, at least at prime number crunching. I haven't tested elisp but the others (Perl, Ruby etc.) are an order of magnitude slower.

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Re:Xray – An experimental next-generation Electron-based tex... by flavio81 on Tuesday March 06, 2018 @08:20AM (#16528635)

>Luajit is the only dynamic language runtime that's faster than V8,

Also Common Lisp (much faster than V8), Forth, and probably some Scheme implementations.

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Re:Xray – An experimental next-generation Electron-based tex... by nine_k on Tuesday March 06, 2018 @09:24AM (#16529008)

To pick nits: Forth is not "dynamic"; words are called by their direct addresses, without any hashtable lookup. It's a stark contrast with Python, Ruby, JS, etc.

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Re:Xray – An experimental next-generation Electron-based tex... by klibertp on Tuesday March 06, 2018 @10:29AM (#16529386)

To be fair, with CREATE/DOES> you can make them do any lookup you want easily. Well, as easy as anything in Forth.

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