Electron Performance Debate

I've found every Electron app I've used to be terrible. This includes VSCode. In fact compare VSCode to Adobe Brackets - both of which are using web technologies as their framework but Brackets is a node.js application while VSCode is Electron, and you'll see just how badly Electron performs when even compared to similar technologies.

Look at VS Code: Electron doesn't have abysmal performance. It's just what people do with it that causes problems.

right? sure there are a lot of buggy slow electron apps but isn't vscode built on electron too? that's the smoothest program on my pc right now

I don't know, for example for me VSCode feels 1000x faster than Photoshop, which is a native app. Photoshop takes a long time to open, breaks the "Windows" keyboard shorcut, is basically slow in general. VSCode has a fast start-up time and everything in it feels responsive. I see a lot of comments from Apple users, maybe Electron works better on Windows than on Mac for some reason?

VS Code is the example I always use when someone is hating on Electron too - yes, it's possible to make slow, memory-hungry Electron apps, but VS Code shows it doesn't have to be this way. Honestly, VS Code is so performant you would think it was a native app.

As much as I wanted to like and use VS Code, Electron base still ruined it for me. If it was some other app where I do not expect instant snappiness and lower memory usage, for example, Slack (also Electron app), I would swallow it, but for an editor, I can`t.

Microsoft is the only company I've seen that can actually get any performance out of Electron, and even then it's still a resource hog. In their favour, though, VSCode is written exclusively for Electron, unlike many of these apps which are essentially SPAs lightly reworked for a non-browser.

Sorry, but I think you're wrong. VS Code is based on Electron and runs great.I read it as a comment on Slack's performance, not as an attack on Electron.

VS Code is technically an Electron app, but it's not the usual lazy resource hog implementation like Slack or something. A lot of work went into making it fast. I doubt you'll find many non-Electron full IDEs that are faster. Look at Visual Studio, that's using a nice native framework and it runs at the speed of fossilized molasses.

Electron is a nice option these days. Slack and VS Code are first-in-class applications, and while there's a slight performance hit compared to native, it's still a better experience than web (otherwise, people would have stuck with slack.com)