> All of the code is OOP-based, and they mount DOM nodes the old-school way (which is what React was supposed to solve..)
I don't know about VS Code, but I remember Atom was refactored to use manual DOM updates because the performance penalty of using React wasn't worth it.[1] By the way, isn't OOP by far the most popular paradigm for building desktop UIs? I imagine VS Code is a difficult codebase to work with that has a lot of intricate code (as is usually the case with large software projects), but that's a strange piece of criticism :-)
I have spent a great deal of time wading through the VS Code codebase and it takes OOP to the extreme. There are mile long inheritance chains, everything is a class, and it is a giant bowl of spaghetti. To some extent, I understand why they used that development approach. It doesn't use a UI framework, just DOM APIs, so classes make sense in lieu of components, but it's still bonkers.
> By the way, isn't OOP by far the most popular paradigm for building desktop UIs?
Yes, but I wish it wasn't. My day job is desktop development (with Electron), and I avoid OOP as much as I can and try to use a functional approach. After jumping all over the VS Code codebase to try to understand how some of this stuff works, and seeing how hard it is to navigate, I think heavy OOP is a bad idea.
Always interesting to hear such claims when graphic editors like Penpot, which have much tighter perf requirements than editors, are so fast while using React.
I think a lot of people don't consider how complex text editors are and then there are the complexities of an IDE, or extensions, to be able to interact with it.
I don't know about VS Code, but I remember Atom was refactored to use manual DOM updates because the performance penalty of using React wasn't worth it.[1] By the way, isn't OOP by far the most popular paradigm for building desktop UIs? I imagine VS Code is a difficult codebase to work with that has a lot of intricate code (as is usually the case with large software projects), but that's a strange piece of criticism :-)
1. https://github.com/atom/atom/pull/5624