The point is not if JavaScript is fast or not (which btw it isn&#x27;t faster than C++ or not even just as fast), but how many layers of abstraction JS has to go through to display stuff on the screen or do anything useful. Having to fight with DOM and CSS to do anything like syntax highlighting is effectively triggering execution of millions of lines of code compared to sublime text that does a raw win32 or Cocoa call.<p>Comparison with 10 years ago is also not so relevant. 10 years ago you didn&#x27;t try to autocomplete through an average modern JS project where thousands of files are created on disk even before you create your first div. Data processing needs are outgrowing CPUs improvements by far.<p>IOW there&#x27;s no way Atom is getting as fast as Sublime, because of the huge stack it is built upon. It might get fast enough though, but my feeling is that the discrepancy is actually getting bigger rather than smaller, as we evolve our average needs as programmers