I think the development of VS Code was kind of an accident. They built Monaco (the editor component) for Visual Studio Online, then made it a standalone text editor as a side project and it ended taking off big time.
If you compare it to the likes of Brackets and Atom, it was significantly faster than the others at release... I'm not sure what can be done to make significant performance gains... I mean being able to even handle large files (disabling any highlighting/autocomplete, and only displaying portion of the file may be necessary)... as it is, for most of what I've used it for vsc is great.
Electron is essentially Node grafted to Chromium... There are a few things that could be done, but would depend on a lot of upstream cooperation to do so.
Sublime uses skia as its rendering library, which is what blink (chromium frontend) uses for rendering. May be electron can provide a nicer api to interface directly with skia.
By giving performant lower level access to render, may be VSC can move some of the perf sensitive code directly to compiled optimized binaries.
Sort of like what node native libraries do.
Sublime does some pretty great dark magic. I was impressed to see vscode approach similar speeds to sublime in search. I believe there is plenty that can be done to make rendering fast, reduce memory consumption and make it a bit light weight. But it would require access to metal APIs
VSCode's plugin model is pretty impressive and tends to isolate the side effects of poorly performing plugins (including language/autocomplete, etc)... so that the main editor tends to be responsive. There should be room to tweak, but I'm pretty happy overall. Way better experience than any full IDE I've tried... I only hope they keep it that way as features come in.
Also, as an Electron app, there is a node element, so compiled components are already an option.
