this post was submitted on 05 Dec 2025
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Lmao this is quite frankly, horseshit, upvoted by people who have never used an IDE.
VScode is lightweight, snappy, and fast to open. VSCodium gives you all of that without any of the Microsoft. And even runs in a web browser.
It's not "horseshit" - I gave you a caveat precisely so that you can understand the limitations of my comparison, and so that you don't need to be so antagonistic.
I launched VSCode fresh this morning. Just now, 4 hours later, I closed it and watched my system memory usage: 1.3GB. I am doing remote development, so there's a whole server process as well which is chomping a few GB. My old laptop repeatedly ground to a halt until the OOM killer woke up/I rebooted as its measly 32GB of RAM couldn't cope with two VSCode sessions (plus other normal apps) after a while.
Two VSCode sessions are NOT the problem if your system with 32GB of ram is stalling lmao
Drawing strong conclusions like 'VSCode is an abomination that runs like dogshit and is worse than an Oracle product', from an admittedly flawed comparison that does not demonstrate that, is inviting some antagonism.
Electron is the abomination, not VSCode, and JetBrains IDEs are developed by... JetBrains, not Oracle.
+1
For stuff like editing massive files or huge folders, the least stuttery, fastest IDE for me is... VScode. Jetbrains (last I tried it) is awful.
Code may not use 1MB of RAM or idle dead asleep, but it utilizes the CPU/GPU efficiently.
Now, extensions are the caveat, like any app that supports extensions. Those can bog it down real quick.
It's not really an IDE and it's not lightweight either.
It's not snappy. Sometimes just moving up a couple lines fast causes my caret to lag, which is not pleasant.
That might have more to do with when you have lots of plugins for LSPs, etc, but who uses vscode without any plugins?
Claiming that VSCode is not an IDE is just pedantic.
It is literally just a modular IDE that lets you pick and choose which piece you want rather then being like Visual Studio or XCode that is tailored for a single language / development flow.
Hell you still have to download core parts of XCode / VS after you download and install them like the development frameworks for your targets, does that mean that they're not actually IDEs?
I will concede on the "not really an IDE" part. You're right you can set it up to be like one.
I say it's not mostly because it isn't marketed as one. It's marketed as just a source code (text) editor.