I am not sure how beneficial it is to judge IDEs only by performance. Find/Replace is not the feature I would use as a measuring stick either. Using Code as a guinea pig, it isn’t trying to be Vim. If anything it’s trying to be a lighter weight, simpler alternative to IntelliJ or Visual Studio. A comparison isn’t fair if the startup & performance costs of some of the heavyweight IDEs used regularly are missing.
300mb sounds like a lot when you are talking about desktop apps like Slack or GitHub (and it is) but our current IntelliJ setup dictates that we allocate 4Gb to the IDE just to debug. Context is also important: On my phone I’ll delete an app using more than 140Mb (Facebook), but that’s because I only have 3Gb to work with. If you’re never using more than 2Gb of memory on an 8Gb (which is below the bare minimum of every place I have ever worked), 300Mb is basically negligible.
The underlying problem is that these IDEs ship with essentially an entire operating system in Chrome, so yes they will always be heavier than native counterparts. But even so they still perform better than some of their mainstream competitors like WebStorm while offering similar capabilities, and that’s really the point.
