Googling if it was a common complaint around launch time shows plenty of threads on it across all the usual sites at that time.

I think OP is both right, and there was people still complaining about it. Atom was seriously slow. Everyone said you couldn’t build a fast text editor that could compare to native ones. VS Code came and it was significantly faster Atom was slow to the point of not being usable to some, while VS Code was perfectly usable. The people wanting vim or Sublime performance were still upset and wrote about it, but vscode was perfectly usable and fast enough for the majority of people. It was indeed held as an example of how to make a performant electron app. Still an electron app, but not absolute slog. Tbh, if you disable all extensions in vscode, it’s still fairly fast, and doesn’t even take that much memory. It’s not as usable without extensions though.

I compared NP++ to VS Code at the time. VS Code was nice to use, but it was slower. It was faster than Visual Studio, but that's because VS Code without extensions didn't have language support, etc like VS did.

I find it odd you see otherwise.

And VS 2026 is faster than VS Code these days, now that they spent time optimizing it.

I'm fairly sure VS low performance and responsiveness is caused by their use of WPF for the UI. Never seen a single responsive application written in that toolkit, it's even worse than electron. Not surprised it hasn't taken off outside of enterprises.

I was using Vim at the time, so didn't get into those discussions. The thing that hurt me was Spotify. They had some other HTMLish desktop app before Electron that was just as bad for memory.

I think you may be right, but I think that actually enforces GP's point: if discussion was about how "a properly tuned electron could be fast", that implies an unstated general belief that electron is slow. In other words, since the time vs code was launched there was indeed a belief that electron was slow (compared to native apps).

Actually I think "properly tuned" sounds like weasel words, a no true scotsman fallacy. "Oh electron is slow? Well, it is slow, but that's not real electron, see if you were doing things the right way it would be fast"

It just means Electron has bad default settings, it's hard to optimize and you might need to move some parts into C++ if you want good performance. Really the same thing as Unreal Engine, there are absolutely fast games made with it but most are super resource heavy.

It was not "bad default settings", like often with UE5, it was "MS did a superb job making VSCode not dog slow like Atom" and it took really lots of work

It means that you need a trillion-dollar company spending millions of man-hours to optimize the performance, using every trick in the book, and inventing a few new ones to deliver one optimized Electron product

Combine a properly tuned config with a sufficiently smart compiler, and Electron is blazing fast!

Even vs code is slow compared to a native app - noticable with large or many files; with search and replace in larger files (xx mb) it even crashes

I definitely remember it being yet another slow editor many people complained about.

Eh, including a whole browser has always been my complaint and I'm sure many others.