Github is rewriting the Atom text editor in Rust to improve performance

Github's Atom has become my most used programming text editor over the last few years. Lots of people love it, especially those who liked Sublime Text which Atom took a lot of inspiration from, but some still hold out and prefer other editors because they feel Atom is too slow.

That might change soon, because in December Github has started rewriting Atom in Mozilla's Rust programming language in a Github repository called Xray with the description "An experimental next-generation Electron-based text editor". The plan is to still use Electron for the UI, but all of the core logic will be written in Rust.

The core goals as stated by Xray's Readme are: High performance, collaboration, extensibility and web compatibility. The Readme goes into more detail of what that means so I won't repeat it here.

While I'm not a fan of Rust (in the systems programming area I find Nim and Red much more interesting, but to each their own) it's still great to see this. Some people will still roll their eyes at Atom because of the Electron UI which does come with a heavy cost in RAM usage and file size, but if the speed improvements are substantial enough, this new Rust based Atom will still attract lots of new developers.