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It seems to me that Electron is a scapegoat here - VS Code is built on Electron and is super snappy and responsive for me, even on large projects. This means two things:

1. Even complex Electron apps can be performant and responsive

2. Microsoft as a company has people that know how to make this happen.

The reality is (speaking as a former MSFT employee) that the Teams and VSCode orgs are so far separated that they might as well be in different companies. The average quality of devs and their respective management chains varies WILDLY across organizations, and given how shitty Teams has been and continues to be, I think it's fair to say one or both of these factors is at play here.

2 comments

Everytime Electron is mentioned, VSC will be presented as counter example. The problem is VSC is the only snappy Electron app out there, Microsoft spend millions optimizing it, while most other Electron apps are crap.

Native programs can be made snappy easily. That's the whole point.

But then with native you have to pay the cross platform price. Which is higher do you think?

With Electron you get cross platform more or less for free and ostensibly you can make it faster later.

Don't get me wrong, I love doing native work, but as someone who has to deal with cross-platform issues in native applications (well games) on the daily, I can tell you that even with massive code reuse and good interfaces, that cost is incredibly high.

> But then with native you have to pay the cross platform price. Which is higher do you think?

You could for example use Qt. It is cross-platform and if you write your application well, the amount of platform-specific code will be quite small.

>With Electron you get cross platform more or less for free and ostensibly you can make it faster later.

It's not for-free. The effort/work for the developer is reduced, while the amount of work for the users' PC is increased. Sure, a lot will think, that this is a great deal, but at in my opinion, you should do it the other way round.

How often have you seen electron apps going faster? I never did. With a native toolkit, you have performance from the beginning for the same quality.

I mean, you are talking about making a goddamn text editor faster — it’s just ridiculous. There should be no lag whatsoever when it comes to UIs in 2021.

Building a text editor across platform with exact the same behavior is somewhat a thing that you almost always to redo "everything" in different platforms.

It isn't very unseasonable to just relies on something that already do most hard works for you.

If you must use some "native" alternative. It is probably something like GTK/QT. But I doubt do they actually have the ability to do such complex edit behavior and layouts.

> It is probably something like GTK/QT. But I doubt do they actually have the ability to do such complex edit behavior and layouts.

They actually can - QtCreator for example. Also, I really don't think that the web would be the panacea of UIs, on the contrary.

But I otherwise agree with you - text editors are surprisingly hard. But I still don't really get the why for teams. It could even just add a webview for the actual meeting part, but let the rest be something actually workable.

> "But then with native you have to pay the cross platform price. Which is higher do you think? With Electron you get cross platform more or less for free"

Don't pay the cross platform price. Stop developing inferior software for your core users so that other people on other platforms can also have inferior software. It's not a good tradeoff, it's a bean-counter's tradeoff.

It's like going to a steak restaurant and finding they only sell lettuce so vegans can eat there, or going to a bar and finding they no longer sell alcohol because they're trying to appeal to tetotallers who don't like bars. It's like Ferrari putting a Honda Civic engine in to try and appeal to both sets of customers and the Honda customers don't want the six figure price tag and the Ferrari customers don't want a low power reliable 4-cylinder engine. It's the "one size fits nobody very well" of software, it's the abandonment of your core competency to appeal to people who hate you.

A handful of people make Sublime Text, which is as good if not better than VS Code. It can be done.

Visual Studio Code is easily one of the most unresponsive IDEs I have used in a long time. If I edit a big file it just completely seizes up while trying to process it again, and everything feels delayed.