Xray – An experimental next-generation Electron-based text editor

Sublime Text and TextMate will both choke big time if you feed them a large enough file without any line breaks. I have some largish machine-generated (5-10 MB) JavaScript data files that will reliably bring either editor to its knees if I accidentally click on one of them. The XCode editor also chokes.

I seem to recall (though haven't tried it for a while) that the Visual Studio Code editor handles them okay.

It's not a big issue -- since these are machine-generated, it's not normally necessary to edit them by hand. Every once in a while, though, I'll accidentally click on one of them in the file tree. Then I'll curse and kill the editor process.

> Software was a lot less capable back then.

Some was.

WinAmp came out in 1997, 2.x was released in 1998. Real time streaming media.

Visual Studio 6 came out in 1998, had most of Intellisense up and running. The refactoring stuff wasn't there yet, but it could do remote debugging.

The Windows APIs were obtuse, but incredibly well documented.

It'd take a long time before a lot of things we take for granted got commoditized though. A streaming video player (+ server) was still an idea that a billion dollar company could be founded on.

It wouldn't have been hard to write a Slack competitor then. It wouldn't have had streaming video, and the client would have been native, but you could have gotten 80% of the functionality in there, and watched as people still complained it was just a fancy wrapper around IRC.

Web forums sucked though. Slashdot figured out the right idea, the entire conversation loaded at once, one big page, it took the rest of the web a lot time to catch up.

20 years later, I'm writing code, managing files, and have a chat app or two open. The monitor is higher res, and a lot larger. Hardware plug and play finally works, and printing is, on Windows at least, pretty much a solved problem. (Heck even Wi-Fi network printer works almost flawlessly!)

The APIs for writing code have gotten easier to use, but it seems like everyone's documentation is now 5, small, steps above garbage. Also APIs break more often nowadays.

My computer has dozens upon dozens of services running, most of which I don't know what they are. And individual websites take up more RAM than my entire OS used to.

That last part isn't even a joke. To load a few paragraphs of text, hundreds of megabytes of RAM.

It is cool that web browsers can natively play video. 99.9% of the time I don't want them to. I kinda just want that paragraph sitting in the tag.

All the best, highest performance AAA games have been written in C++.

So have all the slow, under-performing, crash prone, unoptimized AAA flops.

C++ isn't a magic bullet that gives instant speed. Indeed a long running native app that isn't properly written, will fragment the heck out of memory and get slower and slower. (With 64bit address spaces, at least they don't crash now days!)

The choice of algorithms and data structures is of utmost importance. Optimizing around one's run time is choice #2. C++ doesn't provide some magic hyper optimized environment. Heck C++ doesn't provide much of anything. You need to build a threading model and concurrency model that works, and performs well on different platforms. File I/O performance is different based on the file system in use, NTFS for example hates lots of small files, other file systems have less issues with that usage model.

This goes on and on and on. With C++, every decision has to be made, and each one of those decisions can, if made incorrectly, lead to a poorly performing app.

I love new editors, but i have to ask every time - what is this one doing new?

I'd kill for new editors trying new and interesting methods of text (or code) navigation and editing, but so often i don't feel like i see... anything, new. The only one i can recall offhand is Kakoune, which is basically Vim-like but changes the verb order a bit. It's a nice attempt, i like it.

Yet with things like Atom, Xi, Xray, i don't get what they're doing special?

I totally get that focusing on easy plugins could be a major selling point. I'm not disputing that or ignoring it. I'm merely trying to.. well, i guess understand, why so many new editors pop up but don't try anything new. They just try.. speed, generally.

Am i alone here? I want more Kakounes of the world.

> Are 5k monitors that popular? Do they even exist?

Yes - for example, Apple has been shipping 5K 27” displays in iMacs for three years now.