It's ridiculous. I can launch a VM running Linux + X11 desktop environment from scratch faster than one of the most popular Electron apps launches & connects. Probably would run few apps in the VM well too with the same amount of memory.

Anything that could fix the current situation even a little bit like this project is much appreciated imho.

It starts by avoiding touching anything Electron related.

This craziness just made me buy Sublime Text.

Well, we started prioritizing code cleanliness over everything else and throwing away good tooling because it was old. Blocking performance optimizations because they're "unmaintainable," or just not thinking about resource usage, is going to result in bad software.

I'd bet Slack, for example, has all sorts of abstraction and indirection layers in it, making it impossible to figure out the fastest way to do the job.

Visual Studio Code is pretty light and extremely responsive for me on 2012 hardware

Hence why so many enterprise installs are still proudly running Office 2010.

I do wonder why nobody takes a stab at creating a bonafide Excel clone that looks modern and runs fast (and, no, LibreOffice isn’t good enough).

Because writing an Excel clone which is "good enough" is really, really hard work, takes a really long time and you probably won't get away with "Let's do 80% in version 1 and then optimize" - People expect Excel. Not Excel lite. Especially if they have to pay for it.

I’m not saying it’s easy, but in an age of so much disruption it’s honestly amazing how Excel continues to dominate. And I say this as someone who spends most of my waking hours in Excel...

LibreOffice was written using an overachitected component system; it is very slow. Just writing something without the layers of abstraction would be refreshing.