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The State of Atom's Performance

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Re: The State of Atom's Performance

#191

Post by imron »

stupidcar wrote: post #69
smacktoward wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would phrase the problem slightly differently: not "I want to use the technologies that make me enjoy my job," but "I want to use the technologies that I already know. " Electron is popular because it lets you write desktop apps in JavaScript, and there are a lot of developers out there who know JavaScript. By going with Electron, those developers can build desktop apps without having to learn anything new. They ca…

The thing is, are those alternative toolkits better ? Done right, they're faster, for sure. But when you use Electron you're leveraging thousands of man-years of Google developer effort to build a web browser that works consistently and well across different platforms. Although the web platform gets a bad rep for cross-browser compatibility problems and general weirdness, a huge amount of that goes away when you targ…

> You can style any element, any way you want. You have you have a complete, out-of-the-box object model for your whole UI, plus developer tools to help you

And it only costs you 400MB of RAM and 20% CPU utilization!

Re: The State of Atom's Performance

#192

Post by keymone »

subsection1h wrote: post #160
rubyn00bie wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My general dislike for Atom wasn't anything to do with the editor itself, I've just always been sore they used CoffeeScript which is a language I personally _loathe_. I was excited to have a sublime replacement I could hack on, but that killed it for me. It was that it was so inaccessible and for such a asinine reason (a language purely for syntactical sugar). JavaScript is the lingua franca of the internet for fucks…

> CoffeeScript which is a language I personally _loathe_. [...] it was so inaccessible You know JavaScript, yet CoffeeScript is inaccessible? WTF. I had never written a line of Lisp in my life before using Emacs, but that didn't stop me from writing hundreds of lines of Emacs Lisp during the first weekend that I used Emacs. What's up with the unwillingness (or inability?) that many web developers seem to have for usi…

yeah, I could see myself saying the same but not about coffeescript. That thing just needs to go away, seriously.

Having to constantly keep a mental model of two languages when you write code outweighs any benefits from syntax sugar and supposed readability.

It was nice ten years ago when JavaScript was absolutely horrendous but not now.

Re: The State of Atom's Performance

#193

Post by aphextron »

jamesmcintyre wrote: post #128

Why has Hacker News become such a hotbed for cynicism, ridicule and snark by which almost none comes constructive ideas? I along with many of my fellow engineers use Atom everyday and love it. Sure it has some shortcomings but if anything this retrospective from the Atom team shows that they're trying to address those shortcomings at a rapid clip. I love that it's an entirely open source system and that it is written…

Ask a group of carpenters about what brand of hammer they use and see if you get cool, calm, rational responses.

Re: The State of Atom's Performance

#194

Post by keymone »

nkkollaw wrote: post #24

I do go back to Atom often because of a few details that I like better over VS Code, but it's a lost cause, and reading this proves it. Who cares about start-up time? I only open the thing once/day. Same thing for large files: it's a edge case. Memory usage? Sure, but as developers we probably have GB and GB sitting there, if the thing worked it wouldn't be a big deal for the most important tool in your arsenal. What…

> Memory usage? Sure, but as developers we probably have GB and GB sitting there, if the thing worked it wouldn't be a big deal for the most important tool in your arsenal.

Adding to the other comments about having better use for my memory than piles and piles of JavaScript bloat, how do you think GC performance is affected by the amount of memory it has to manage?

All the micro lags in rendering and input handling are affecting your performance consciously and subconsciously.

You know, the exact thing you complain about:

> What Atom sucks at is regular file editing: huge latency when typing, constant freezes (try editing remote files), and general sluggishness.

Re: The State of Atom's Performance

#195

Post by c909 »

jopsen wrote: post #174
styfle wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Electrino was a great idea, but the project was more of a POC and I haven’t seen any new development. So until someone can build a production ready, cross platform, JS desktop experience....Electron will live on.

On android I think both Chrome and Firefox supports installing a website as an icon on the home screen. It might already hide the address bar when opened in this mode. I personally expect that it's just a matter of time before this becomes an install mode for desktop apps as well.

http://fluidapp.com/

Re: The State of Atom's Performance

#196

Post by flukus »

nkkollaw wrote: post #127
ASalazarMX wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We as developers might have plenty of RAM to waste, but our users usually don't. If it runs well on our machine but not in the users', what good is it? Even if it runs well on the users' machines, how many resource-heavy applications can they run concurrently? Will they have to close one to open another?

> We as developers might have plenty of RAM to waste, but our users usually don't. Mh? This is a tool for developers. I don't get your point. My mom isn't going to use Atom for her shopping list :-)

Unfortunately the attitude is pervasive and electron is also used for applications more in line with what your mom would be using. I think many would be shocked that a good chunk of their audience has less than 8GB: http://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey

It's also a mistake to assume developers have plenty of RAM to waste. A couple of years ago I was using a potato for coding on the way to work that only had 2GB, which made atom a no go.

Also, what happened to the idea of dog-fooding? It's not dog-fooding if your on a machine much faster and with more memory than your users. I think the problem with windows 10 is that all the devs were dog-fooding on top of the line surface pros.

Re: The State of Atom's Performance

#197

Post by _d8fd »

jamesmcintyre wrote: post #128

Why has Hacker News become such a hotbed for cynicism, ridicule and snark by which almost none comes constructive ideas? I along with many of my fellow engineers use Atom everyday and love it. Sure it has some shortcomings but if anything this retrospective from the Atom team shows that they're trying to address those shortcomings at a rapid clip. I love that it's an entirely open source system and that it is written…

Beats me. I use Atom everyday and spend zero time wishing I had a better editor.

Re: The State of Atom's Performance

#198

Post by cududa »

rayiner wrote: post #163
jamesmcintyre wrote: post #128

Why has Hacker News become such a hotbed for cynicism, ridicule and snark by which almost none comes constructive ideas? I along with many of my fellow engineers use Atom everyday and love it. Sure it has some shortcomings but if anything this retrospective from the Atom team shows that they're trying to address those shortcomings at a rapid clip. I love that it's an entirely open source system and that it is written…

> Why has Hacker News become such a hotbed for cynicism, ridicule and snark by which almost none comes constructive ideas? My experience is that Engineers are just snarky and cynical. Especially about text editors. Frankly, HN is a lot more constructive than Slashdot or Reddit was back in the day.

Not sure I entirely agree with the second bit. I adored Reddit until everyone abandoned digg for it. Just about every post had some expert commentary

Re: The State of Atom's Performance

#199

Post by ConcernedCoder »

I love JavaScript and the IDEA of Atom ( I recently tried it again last week ), but a 1/2 second-per-keystroke lag ( on a kinda beefy PC IMHO see: https://pcpartpicker.com/user/jeffallen6767/saved/#view=KT9R... ) is a deal breaker for me. If I can't type 60 words a minute in your IDE, I'm just not able to use it sorry.

Re: The State of Atom's Performance

#200

Post by ta4399 »

eropple wrote: post #188
maskedSlacker wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Relative to Atom, which I left for VS Code: Code is faster and lighter, just as extensible. Better git integration and code analysis, even for Javascript (I finally understand what devs from other languages were talking about!). My workflow is just smoother for everything except Clojure and system admin (but I use emacs for those, atom isn't any better there).

VS Code was my first not-Sublime, not-vim editor, but...I really, really missed my four-up display with four editors in a square configuration. I went to Atom because of that and because of VS Code's inability to keep a pane open even with no tabs (just because nothing's in it doesn't mean I want it closed ).

In case you haven't tried it, have you opened new windows (Ctrl+Shift+N)?

I know it's not what you asked for but it's how I use it for a similar work flow. They don't close when I close the last file.

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