Comment by piker 4 days ago
Perhaps that is an accurate percentage, but lawyers are in that .01%. If you're competing with Microsoft Word on performance you'd better be stupid fast and lightweight. Transactional lawyers routinely have dozens of Word documents and PDFs open at a time. Not long-term viable with something like Electron.
Not necessarily. You can have dozens of Word instances open and it still doesn't bog the system down nearly as much as 5 Notions with the Chromium renderer. Word might not seem fast, but it's lightweight enough to work on the crappiest PCs you (or the IT dept) can find.
VS Code is very much a special case and not the least bit representative of the typical Electron app. It benefits from having some of the best talent available working on it and has multiple bits that drop down to lower-level solutions to improve performance, both of which Microsoft is willing to pay for because VS Code entrenches them in the software development world in ways it wouldn’t be otherwise.
> has multiple bits that drop down to lower-level solutions to improve performance
Such as?
> VS Code is very much a special case and not the least bit representative of the typical Electron app.
And Obsidian, and Discord, and Logseq, and Notion, and Figma, and Slack, and Postman, and Insomnia, and so on, and so. Oh wait, so it's not only VS Code?
> Such as?
At minimum it uses ripgrep for file searching, which is written in Rust but I thought I read blog posts about other parts in the past.
> And Obsidian, and Discord, and Logseq, and Notion, and Figma, and Slack, and Postman, and Insomnia, and so on, and so.
Out of the mentions in that list I’ve used, only Obsidian feels comparatively responsive to VS Code. Notion and Slack in particular are slow and can get super bogged down. Discord and Figma sit somewhere in between.
I'm not sure I agree it's "very performant", but nonetheless I do love it. (Compare it to Zed, for example.)
In any event, VS code is only required to render text in a single font, with very few layout concerns, styling, run-level formatting, etc. that require re-flowing across multiple of pages, etc. And each of those is text files measuring in the bytes. Tritium, by contrast, has to hold and operate on PDFs and Word documents each with very complicated layout and rendering logic and measuring in the kbs.
Word has the worst performance ever. So I don't think competing with Word on performance should be hard.