I use vs code and jet brains intellij. Vscode is by miles more stable and light weight for running a java spring app. Of course intellij runs a lot of stuff but the experience is not better for it. Intellij feels like a sloth next to vscode

Make sure you’ve got your IJ memory settings tuned right. I assign 8GB rather than the default (2?).

Also, if you’re on a Mac — there’s an Apple Silicon build that is noticeably better.

> I assign 8GB rather than the default

This is not a good argument in a thread where the central claim is that VSC is a resource hog but other IDEs aren't

Yeah this sounds like a misconfiguration. We've already forgotten that native apps tend to require a bit more fine control on how they use resources, all in the name of the cult of portability.

How do I configure it right? One good thing about vs code is it works well out of the box with almost zero custom configuration

IntelliJ is not very fast by any benchmark. I mean it's based on Swing!

C++ based editors like Kate blow both VSC and IJ out of the water. Runs so fast it feels janky, like the computer isn't doing anything.

I haven't heard of Kate. I'll try it out

It's from the KDE project, and while it's portable, but I can't speak for how well it looks on other platforms.

IntelliJ has a lot of legacy code, including custom re-implementation of all things UI.

And it offers vastly more features than VS Code.

It also does maybe a quarter of what IDEA can do. Let's see how it performs when it catches up to what IDEA does right now (maybe in another ten years).

It does everything I need to run to do my job. If intellij is doing more stuff that is slowing it down then maybe they can find a better performance-feature trade off by getting rid of the bloat

It would turn into another run of the mill text editor like VSCode then, and would lose most of its users.

Vs code is not a run of the mill editor though. It can be configured to support all useful features of intellij. Even then it's faster than intellij

Why is it that VSCode is the only good Electron app? I get that Microsoft have talented developers, but so does other companies, yet VSCode remain the single application that shows that Electron apps can work.

Even though it is based on web tech and Electron, VSCode cares about performance, while garbage like Microsoft Teams does not. That's about it.

Also, Figma.

Obsidian also

I think WebAssembly might play a role there. https://twitter.com/mattrickard/status/1410714002456383490

I use discord and gitkraken every day and I've never had any issues either. People just like to complain. They act as if using a few hundred megabytes for the main app you are using is an issue. It's not the 90s anymore ram is cheap, especially at those amount.

Why is it better to have a million people buy more RAM, creating a large amount of electronic waste and emissions, instead of putting some effort into not unnecessarily wasting resources?

You don't need to buy more ram. It was already cheap a decade ago. Ram has been in the multiple gigabyte range for longer than that. Having an app that you use all the time every day use a few hundred of the otherwise unused ram is perfectly reasonable.

> It's not the 90s anymore ram is cheap, especially at those amount.

I just wrote the exact same thing in another comment.

That's what the problem is ... it's the old timers complaining that things aren't native, thus they are RAM hogs and are slow by default. Even if they are fast, they are "slow and bloated" just because it's the gut reaction when you have layers on layers of other stuff over native code.

And I'm an old timer but I am not complaining. I love VS Code and I think it's blazing fast for what I need it for, a large Angular enterprise application.

Or maybe you're just fine with throwing away thousands of dollars at it every few years, so you're not seeing the problem. The "solution" that most of the world simply cannot afford.

If I could roll my eyes any harder, they’d be spinning.

99.9% of people who complain about electron apps are not ardent defenders of third world computing. It just violates their sensibilities.

I am not one of those "99.9%" (seems like a random number pulled out of someone's ass). Most developers in my poor country don't make much and would quality as lower-middle class in yours. Including a good friend of mine, who is learning web development on a 10-year old laptop — he can't afford anything else. I know he struggles with VSC because I hear about it daily.

I feel for your friend, and I hope he gets some better hardware solutions soon.

But I think it’s unfair to hold developer tools back to 10 year old specifications.

Of cut it off with most of the world bullshit, we’re talking about development tool here, not solving world hunger.

There are no developers outside Silicon Valley, got it.

Right, because world is divided in Silicon Valley and third world hellholes.

People act as if their precious app is the only one a user is going to run and has the right to hog all the memory and CPU.

> Why is it that VSCode is the only good Electron app?

Because you need to sink hundreds of thousands of man-hours into making it work.

And fight against web tech most of the time you're doing that.