
Atom: Editor window startup is slow - tosh
https://github.com/atom/atom/issues/2654
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drno123
Amazing that so many comments compare Atom performance to Sublime and
TextMate, but do not mention the fact that Sublime and TextMate are native
while Atom is based on Electron. They profile module loads etc, but fail to
recognize that Atom first has to start layout engine and JS engine, then
initialize all that code and only after that it can start executing
application code. As a personal rant, and performance issues aside,
HTML5+CSS+JS is a terrible programming paradigm, unfortunately the only one
that stuck for web apps. But to use the same paradigm on desktop????

~~~
Spartan-S63
I think it's important to keep drawing the distinction, but you're right, the
thread didn't really point out the difference and that's what's missing in the
conversation.

I think it's important to remind everyone of the world we used to live in
where apps were native to the platform they ran on and were performant and
power efficient. I think that's even more important than ever to remember now.

That said, somehow Microsoft has pulled off a miracle with VS Code as it's
reasonably efficient and performant given the tech stack it's implemented on
top of. I think a lot of this has to do with Microsoft being a company that
established itself in OS and native application development for Windows. They
have an ethic of performance whereas GitHub may not have had that at the time
that Atom came on the scene.

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NetOpWibby
This issue is from 2014 with last activity in November of last year. It was
just marked as stale 15 days ago by a repo bot.

Am I missing something as to why this was posted?

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saagarjha
Maybe because it’s been closed recently?

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darkkindness
That's interesting. Atom (last I checked) shows you profiling of how each
package contributes to start-up time, and it's always been slow regardless. It
seems like it's been consistently slow for 5.5 years now, which is
unfortunate.

Start-up time was the number one reason I was not sold on the Luna language
editor -- they were building it on top of Atom! (they are rebuilding it
though, or maybe that is already done)

~~~
NetOpWibby
The profiler is nice but Atom was still too slow for my tastes. Then I found
Sublime and plugins to replicate my Atom customization. I cannot go back to
that.

For apps like Slack, I’m perfectly content with Electron.

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mjtlittle
I tried atom in the past and felt the definite slowness by comparison to other
text editors, I would definitely need to check it out today to see if anything
has changed. I currently use vscode and it feels really snappy for the
practically the same functionality.

I also find it interesting that Microsoft is looming over both of these
projects, I wonder what that will mean for the future.

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edoceo
Issue recently closed by Stale-bot, not updated since Nov 2018.

IME Atom is not nearly as slow as it used to be, unless you're on a remote FS
or have many, many files in the project directory - like it scans them all
when starting - so I just keep my project directory small.

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NetOpWibby
Should you have to do that though?

