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Improving startup time in Atom with V8 snapshots

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Re: Improving startup time in Atom with V8 snapshots

#81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't consider emacs successful. Succesful among fanatics, maybe, but I don't consider is valuable to a serious programmer. Also, surely it's not that hard to switch languages? In my experience all languages are essentially the same.

Not useful to serious programmers? Do you feel the same way about Vim? Just because you haven't gotten used to using something, doesn't mean it's necessarily total shit. There is a reason why people have been using emacs for decades.

I do actually, and I should reword that to "not useful for serious programming." VIM to me is best used for lightweight, quick and short editing tasks. THats how I use it. For any involved work, you're going to want a debugger, you're going to want automated build tools, you're going to want effortless compile/run cycles and so on..

You don't really want to implement all of that in VIM because your work won't be portable.

Re: Improving startup time in Atom with V8 snapshots

#82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

See, I just don't understand why you would want to use emacs over an editor that does all the work for you. Thats why I avoid it, it seems like a big cost that I don't have to pay if I just use a different editor.

People seem to ridiculously inflate this cost. If you are going to be using a tool for 40 hours a week 50 weeks a year for the next decade then you will be using it for 20,000 hours over the next decade. Spending a few hours to configure it to your liking. In fact if you start atom and wait 6 seconds for it to start just once a day then twice wait 3 seconds for a new window you will in the same time frame have waited…

Heres the thing, its a cost you pay for every single project you start and every change you make to your build system. Emacs makes it possible but hard to maneuver, by my reckoning.

There are some really giant projects where that becomes reasonable, but for me thats just not the case. And if I were going to invest time like that, I'd rather invest it into an environment which has a higher ceiling for what it can do (emacs doesnt provide fast/rich/easy autocomplete, for example)

Re: Improving startup time in Atom with V8 snapshots

#83

I'm way more worried about memory issues while running. Atom take up 1 gig+ with very little open. It pushes all my other tools out of RAM and into swap. Switching to the browser to see documentation takes a few seconds if I'm lucky. Compiling a few more seconds to page in. Ssh a few more. Everything on my laptop slows to a crawl as they fight for RAM with Atom taking up the way more than it should. I know the answer…

same here, I've switched away from Atom for that reason.

Re: Improving startup time in Atom with V8 snapshots

#84
Great article. Avid ST3 user here, but glad to hear about the improvements.

For anyone curious, I made a quick gif comparing startup times on my machine for Sublime Text 3 (Build 3129), Atom (1.16.0), Atom Beta (1.17.0-beta2, the one mentioned here), VSCode (1.11.2), and VSCode Insiders (1.12)

https://media.giphy.com/media/3ohzdTHkfj5ISAAPq8/source.gif

I should mention - my ST3 is heavily customized (28 plugins), while Atom and VSCode are absolute stock.

Re: Improving startup time in Atom with V8 snapshots

#85
post #60
post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If this was truly that simple, don't you think someone would have already done it? Furthermore, is there even an actively maintained, open source, cross platform, development-focused text editor with native UI components?

> If this was truly that simple, don't you think someone would have already done it? Someone already has done it. An one-man-shop built Sublime Text by himself. Surely it's not having JS as an extension language as opposed to Python (the only difference between ST and what I propose) that's making it difficult. > Furthermore, is there even an actively maintained, open source, cross platform, development-focused text…

I think the developer behind Sublime Text is widely recognised as an outlier.

>> "Sublime Text 2 is mostly coded in C++ and uses a custom UI toolkit." ... [0]

How many other devs/teams are going to reasonably take that on.

(And how do you think the debugging story of his custom framework compares to Chrome Devtools).

[0] http://stackoverflow.com/a/9201645

Re: Improving startup time in Atom with V8 snapshots

#86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a benefit if your engineers already know JavaScript, obviously. Also, emacs is one of the most successful text editors so I'm not sure I get your comparison.

I don't consider emacs successful. Succesful among fanatics, maybe, but I don't consider is valuable to a serious programmer. Also, surely it's not that hard to switch languages? In my experience all languages are essentially the same.

Do you really conflate suitable to your own tastes with being useful or not? Further in what profession is any tool "all the same" See the blub paradox.

Re: Improving startup time in Atom with V8 snapshots

#87
post #84

Great article. Avid ST3 user here, but glad to hear about the improvements. For anyone curious, I made a quick gif comparing startup times on my machine for Sublime Text 3 (Build 3129), Atom (1.16.0), Atom Beta (1.17.0-beta2, the one mentioned here), VSCode (1.11.2), and VSCode Insiders (1.12) https://media.giphy.com/media/3ohzdTHkfj5ISAAPq8/source.gif I should mention - my ST3 is heavily customized (28 plugins), whi…

They all look to be within the same ballpark; none of those startup times would be a problem for me, at least. But when I tried Atom it was noticeably less responsive, which I have very little tolerance for. I haven't tried VS Code. (I also use Sublime)

Re: Improving startup time in Atom with V8 snapshots

#88
post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Must every thread about VSCode and Atom start the same way? It's a trade off: performance for a cross platform JavaScript app development. If that is a tradeoff you don't have to make, don't do it. Atom and VSCode have made that tradeoff. I don't know what rehashing this can possibly accomplish.

> Must every thread about VSCode and Atom start the same way If many people believe this is the case, why not? All articles get some common types of responses based on the topic, this is just one topic/response combo that you happen to disagree with. > It's a trade off: performance for a cross platform JavaScript app development. It's an unnecessary tradeoff. If a single developer can create ST from scratch for Windo…

Using web technology was less about making development easier on us, because in many ways it made it harder. Web technology is about enabling extension authors to use a powerful and familiar technology to achieve their goals.

Re: Improving startup time in Atom with V8 snapshots

#89
post #11

New world, same old problems. Fascinating to see how this parallels the way Emacs tackled this problem long ago. - https://lwn.net/Articles/673724/ - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11001796

I don't recall overcoming long startup times in vi and vim . Did I miss something?

Emacs and Atom share the architectural aspect of implementing most of their functionality in a higher-level language inside of an execution environment. This has costs and benefits.

vi had a much simpler structure and much more limited feature set. vim is obviously a much more capable/flexible editor and has scripting support, but is still predominantly written in C.

Re: Improving startup time in Atom with V8 snapshots

#90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I dont seem to have much experience? Based on what? Based on the fact that you think all programming languages are essentially the same. That's just a ridiculous claim and it immediately exposes you as someone who's only used a couple of Algol derivatives.

2 things 1. I don't think literally all programming languages are the same 2. I have used Haskell, and am very aware of every language listed in the other replies to this comment, so you're completely wrong. I kind of thought this community was better than this, to be honest.

This community is in fact pretty good you posted something wholly and totally ridiculous and the worst thing anyone has said is that you need to get out there and get more experience.

Try saying silly things on reddit and watch the hate flow in.

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