VS Code is definitely the best performing Electron app I've ever used, but as someone who daily drives Sublime Text, it's clear how much better the native app written in C++ (Sublime) performs.
VS Code for me is the exception that proves the rule.
Its great and in most ways feels like a native app, but this is a very different experience than every other Electron app I use which all tend to leak significant amounts of memory over time (VS Code does this too but to a lesser degree), lock up in weird ways (task still running in task manager but any attempt to invoke a new UI window results in nothing happening until I go and manually kill all the zombie tasks running in the bg), etc.
It's much closer to Sublime Text (or maybe Notepad++ if you slapped a plugin-browser on it) than to a "real" IDE. It's not snappier or lighter-weight than Sublime.
By offering a subset of their capabilities, with key features implemented in a multi-process architecture, using plenty of C++ and Rust written modules.
Additionally the terminal has to use WebGL to achieve usable performance.
key features implemented in a multi-process architecture, using plenty of C++ and Rust written modules
Which is exactly the point—the UI is written in HTML/CSS, not the native platform language, and the high-performance modules are written in C++ and Rust, also not the native platform language.
Yes, web app programming sucks. But a web framework UI that communicates with a native backend has a lot of advantages when compared with the actual alternatives I could use instead. The web has gotten orders of magnitude more investment in tools, and it shows.
This point feels as though the author intends it to function as a 'defeater' -- C++ and Rust are used, therefore VSCode is a bad example (as a neighbor post says, an 'exception that proves the rule'.)
I invite you to consider that the converse may be true: if you can keep things performant by RIIR or even C++, it makes a great case that desktop apps should resemble web apps, with a native backend talking to a JS/CSS/HTML frontend. It does not function as a cautionary tale, but as a compelling proof-of-concept.
Although I agree, VS Code also uses excessive amount of RAM. More than any IDE I've used in the past. Still, I use it because it's the best free option.
VS Code seems to outperform all the other IDEs I've used in the past