> If you want electron app that doesn't lag terribly

My experience with VS Code is that it has no perceptible lag, except maybe 500ms on startup. I don't doubt people experience this, but I think it comes down to which extensions you enable, and many people enable lots of heavy language extensions of questionable quality. I also use Visual Studio for Windows builds on C++ projects, and it is pretty jank by comparison, both in terms of UI design and resource usage.

I just opened up a relatively small project (my blog repo, which has 175 MB of static content) in both editors and here's the cold start memory usage without opening any files:

- Visual Studio Code: 589.4 MB

- Visual Studio 2022: 732.6 MB

update:

I see a lot of love for Jetbrains in this thread, so I also tried the same test in Android Studio: 1.69 GB!

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skydhash an hour ago | parent [-]

That easily takes the worst designed benchmark in my opinion.

Have you tried Emacs, VIM, Sublime, Notepad++,... Visual Studio and Android Studio are full IDEs, meaning upon launch, they run a whole host of modules and the editor is just a small part of that. IDEs are closer to CAD Software than text editors.

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morganherlocker 22 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

- notepad++: 56.4 MB (went gray-window unresponsive for 10 seconds when opening the explorer)

- notepad.exe: 54.3 MB

- emacs: 15.2 MB

- vim: 5.5MB

I would argue that notepad++ is not really comparable to VSCode, and that VSCode is closer to an IDE, especially given the context of this thread. TUIs are not offering a similar GUI app experience, but vim serves as a nice baseline.

I think that when people dump on electron, they are picturing an alternative implementation like win32 or Qt that offers a similar UI-driven experience. I'm using this benchmark, because its the most common critique I read with respect to electron when these are suggested.

It is obviously possible to beat a browser-wrapper with a native implementation. I'm simply observing that this doesn't actually happen in a typical modern C++ GUI app, where the dependency bloat and memory management is often even worse.

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throwaway2037 an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

I never understand why developers spend so much time complaining about "bloat" in their IDEs. RAM is so incredibly cheap compared to 5/10/15/20 years ago, that the argument has lost steam for me. Each time I install a JetBrains IDE on a new PC, one of the first settings that I change is to increase the max memory footprint to 8GB of RAM.

	▲	Dylan16807 4 minutes ago \| parent \| next [-]
		> RAM is so incredibly cheap compared to 5/10/15/20 years ago Compared to 20 years ago that's true. But most of the improvement happened in the first few years of that range. With the recent price spikes RAM actually costs more today than 10 years ago. If we ignore spikes and buy when the cycle of memory prices is low, DDR3 in 2012 was not much more than the price DDR5 was sitting at for the last two years.
	▲	skydhash 28 minutes ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		I don’t really complain about bloat in IDEs. They have their uses. But VSCode feature set is a text editor and it’s really bloated for that.