It’s ironic that VS Code has become the premier Electron-based IDE, since Electron (originally called Atom Shell) came from the original Atom project.
I loved using Atom, and I like that there’s a community trying to keep it going. However, I think there’s value in trying to push the platform forward, too; maybe rethinking the extension model to maximize stability/performance would allow Pulsar to start stealing market share back from VS Code.
Ironic and fantastic. So many good ideas are born and die with short-lived projects because no one bothered to extract and polish them as standalone solutions while the project was still alive.
Atom will continue living through Electron (regardless of Pulsar)
Actually, it's not that ironic, considering that the first projects are usually not the one dominating a space later. The first ones are often still exploring the new space, and thus enabling later projects to learn from their failures and optimizing faster on this experience.
And AFAIK VS Code demonstrated this pretty well. Atom was all in on JavaScript (or CoffeeScript AFAIK) for gaining the benefits coming with it, leading to performance-penaltys and other problems. While VS Code was also heavily optimizing on performance, sidestepping JavaScript and minimizing the customizability for the sake of stability. Atom only later focused more on this, but was killed along the way when they started their research-project for better performance. But good enough, at least we got treesitter coming out of it, so it wasn't wasted at the end.
I loved using Atom, and I like that there’s a community trying to keep it going. However, I think there’s value in trying to push the platform forward, too; maybe rethinking the extension model to maximize stability/performance would allow Pulsar to start stealing market share back from VS Code.