It has more to do with the Monaco editor (the web-based editor that you see in typescriptlang.org as well as VSCode). Monaco as an initiative has been around for longer than Atom, I think (?)

Visual Studio Code is built on Electron, the same node.js+webUI system built for Atom.

So I believe it's a jab at both.

But for some reason atom is much slower than vsc :/ I think it's a jab only at atom.

Ask that to the IDEA and Eclipse folks. Certainly chrome feels smoother to me than either of them do on equivalent hardware. And if we pop over into desktop linux, it's even more one-sided towards browsers.

smooth as butter on my macbook.

But you shouldn't need high end hardware to run a text editor.

I have a pretty generic Lenovo running Linux. VSCode is way more responsive (as OP says, smooth as butter) than Atom on it.

On my old macbook air (4 years old) VScode run way more smoothly and start 2 or 3 times faster than Atom.

It's interesting how people seem to have very different experiences with lag on vscode. I wonder if it's actually much more laggy on some system configurations. What are your running it on?

Not surprising since most people have their own pool of extensions that they'll install but fail to mention any time the topic comes up. This is the "Firefox is beastly" strain of criticism all over again.

I've noticed that VSCode + the JSX plugin, when run concurrently with webpack in watch mode, cause my machine to thrash. Working theory is that they are both watching the large node_modules folder, but yet to confirm.