Apples to oranges comparison. VS Code is a text editor whereas Xcode and Jetbrains are IDEs. The real comparison should be with Sublime Text vs VS Code. Sublime Text blows VSCode out of water while opening the same project folder.

Here's a naive comparison

    ~/workspace/iOS Project(develop)
     time subl .
    
    ________________________________________________________
    Executed in   75.46 millis    fish           external
       usr time   21.45 millis  106.00 micros   21.34 millis
       sys time   14.84 millis  659.00 micros   14.18 millis
    
    
    ~/workspace/iOS Project(develop)
     time code .
    
    ________________________________________________________
    Executed in    4.18 secs   fish           external
       usr time  123.39 millis   99.00 micros  123.29 millis
       sys time  175.07 millis  585.00 micros  174.49 millis

That's not a fair comparison either. VSCode does way more than Sublime Text. I actually found VSCode closer to Intellij than to Sublime Text.

How is VSCode anything similar to IntelliJ other than they both can edit text and has plugins?

VSCode language plugins allow you to get autocomplete, go to definition, refactor support, debugging tools, etc.

Closer to IntelliJ than to Sublime, in my experience.

But such plugins exist for Sublime, too. Especially since the Language Server Protocol has been implemented.

Plugins on VSCode are a whole order of magnitude better than on Sublime, mainly because Sublime's Python API is not great.

Is there something remotely comparable to VSCode's debugger view on Sublime for instance?

I cannot tell if this comment is sarcasm or not.

Which features of IntelliJ is VSCode lacking?

IntelliJ is very slow so that's no surprise.

It's not really and apples to oranges comparison.

With the C/C++ and CMake Tools extensions installed, VSCode is an IDE that provides pretty much the same features as Xcode (for some features Xcode is ahead, and for others VSCode).

XCode needs about 12 seconds to start into a C/C++ project (on my mid-2014 13"MBP), while VSCode needs 3 (and yes I start into both fairly frequently from the command line). When actually working in the IDEs, for some things XCode feels slicker, for others VSCode. All in all, XCode really isn't a good argument in the whole "Electron vs Native debate" (and the same is true for VSCode vs Visual Studio btw).

That's something I wonder too. What VS Code does right that, let's say Slack, fails on?

Slack allows my colleagues to chock it full of multi-megabyte animated gifs and cat images, but VSCode so far doesn't.

I'm not surprised that Slack's memory use tends to explode.

Yeah I've also tried to understand this. Tried looking for blog posts on what VS Code is doing but couldn't find one. Can someone point out if there's any?

One thing is that they rely on DOM reflow - the automatic, dynamic sizing of elements - as little as possible: nearly everything in the VSCode UI has a fixed size and position. Reflow is arguably the most costly feature of the web when it comes to dynamic apps (though also one of its most valuable features).

Delay loading everything until needed

Parts are written in C/++ no?

Nope.

The file search uses `ripgrep` which is written in Rust. But that is it as far as I know.

Slack is a messy one page app developed by PHP programmers and vscode is open source and actually made by competent people.

Slack is really weird. It seems like they would have the resources to do native applications. I can't fault anyone for doing an Electron app as a demo, prototype, MVP, that's seems completely reasonable.

What I don't get is why they don't want to make a native macOS client, or Windows client. For Linux I get that they don't necessarily know if it should be GTK, QT, should they adopt KDE standards or Gnome, something else maybe? I can see why they would like Electron in that case.

For something like the Mac... They could do a fantastic client, it would use very little memory, play nice with the OS and be fast. Their users would notice and love it.

They have to build and maintain the web version regardless. Why also write individual clients for Windows, Mac and Linux when they can simply wrap the website in a thin desktop wrapper and call it a day?

Because they care about the user experience and delivering the best possible product to their customers? Maybe not.

Based on their success, that's exactly what they are already doing, presumably thanks to the choices they are making.

Maybe it's easy to sell the "One codebase on all platform" idea to the managers and hard to justify the need for high quality app? People are using it anyway.

Especially considering they already have a good iOS Client with their iPad app!

People could perhaps already use that on the M1 Macs and have a better experience.

And I suppose Facebook is therefore also developed by incompetent PHP programmers despite being one of the largest technology companies in the world?

Yes. I am not even joking. Facebook was so terrible that they had to literally reinvent their wheels (hiphop). Its not hard to become a large company when you have black budget backing as confirmed by Snowden.

Your own sentence argues against itself: the team that built HHVM certainly are not "terrible PHP developers"...

You don't think its strange that facebook hired PHP programmers to create the product and then have to hire competent people to fix that shit as far removed from company logic as possible?

Doesn't it kinda make you think, just a little?

I hope you are joking. Those people you call incompetent built arguably the best web application in the world propelling itself into a global corporate juggernaut and that qualifies as built by incompetent people?

The hubris is frightening.

Visual Studio Code is fast on startup and that's it. It chokes on million LOC project while Eclipse and Intellij work fine.

I use it daily on multi-million LOC projects and it's just fine...

Out of interest, what language are your projects written in? I've had to work on C# .NET codebases of that size and have had the same issues as the previous response.

VSCode itself doesn't fall over, but code completion and error highlighting are painfully slow to catch up and several of the extensions that provide that functionality regularly crash out.

Python — sad to hear that the C# tooling isn't great on large codebases though :(

I work in multi-thousand LOC projects in TS in vscode. It lags.

It LAGS a lot. I work on Xcode Swift projects and the difference is amazing (and Xcode is quite crap). Auto-complete or sometimes just opening a file takes seconds. (I know my project has a bit more complexity that a normal react/node app, but still...)

Add some extensions to VSCode to get the same functionality you have in JetBrains, and open a workspace with dozens of repos. I'll wait while you reboot because you went OoM (I'm only being half obtuse here).