Sorry but the very good Electron app which actually is very good, VSCode, really does suck if you maintain 10 projects. That’s not a lot of projects. It’s just a lot of browser tabs multiplied by documentation in an actual browser.
I agree you have to keep the number of VSCode windows quite low (5 is ok, 10 will make it struggle) but in fairness how many times have you had 10 instances of Visual Studio or IntelliJ running? I've never got close to that.
"No worse than a Java-based app" is sorta damning with faint praise. Java is notorious for being ill-suited for user-facing desktop apps - and justifiably so, at least historically.
But I agree with your core point. I use VS Code all the time, regularly switching between maybe a dozen different projects, and I personally don't run into performance issues or resource constraints very often. Certainly less often than with heavyweight IDEs like IntelliJ, Eclipse or XCode. But I felt the same way about Atom as well, so maybe my typical project/workflow/usage pattern is less resource intensive than others. (For one thing I hardly ever run apps from _within_ the IDE, I prefer to build/test/run from a terminal, so that might be a factor.)
VS Code isn't quite as responsive or quick to start as something like vim, or even emacs when run in a terminal, but its resource demands seem roughly on par with any other feature-rich IDE/editor in my experience.
> Java is notorious for being ill-suited for user-facing desktop apps - and justifiably so, at least historically.
I'm on a trip in Brazil, and so far I saw 1 commercial system built in Java at a grocery store cashier, and 3 Government systems: Border and Customs office's computer, Postal Office ("Correios") point of sale (a desktop), and the software that must be used for tax return by all citizens (IRPF).
All of them used by millions of people directly or indirectly, all of them implemented in Java Swing.
- Four that I maintain directly which integrate together, so even if I’m only working on one at a time I often have to cross reference. This is a good candidate for a workspace, but lots of my workflow broke when I tried it. It’s entirely possible that’s solvable but I had more pressing work to do.
- Two related projects which I seldom contribute to directly, but integrate with the prior four, and I cross reference frequently as well.
- One for organizing and tracking work, notes, various work-related detritus.
- Generally my top three personal projects. I’m not working on them nearly as frequently, but they too are useful for cross referencing. And with seven windows already open, it’s slower to open and close them on demand than to just leave them up.
Visual Studio (purple icon) can struggle with just one instance, especially if you're using ReSharper. As for the IntelliJ family, I've run Rider with about 10 projects a few times and it was fine (granted, those projects were small).
