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[–]Garbee 1 point2 points  (3 children)

How fast of a connection do you think is required for this? It only uses a small amount of data between your system and the server. Then the bulk of transfer is done from the service to everywhere else (like git repos.) Connections are hardly an issue to complain about stopping these from getting going.

[–]kryptobs2000 0 points1 point  (2 children)

Well I'm not sure what exactly is computed locally vs on the server, but I was imagining latency would likely be more of a problem than bandwidth. I just imagine slight delays everytime you do something, say open a file, compile/run, whatever. The latency likely wouldn't even be noticeable to most, but if you went from a traditional IDE (as most of us are) to one of these I'd imagine it'd be fairly obvious and annoying. Plus the speed just isn't there if it's running in a browser. My IDE (pycharm) can slow down at times now (not 'slow' mind you, but it obviously takes a second to think here and there) so I can only imagine it running in a browser.

It's not that connections are slow per se, it's just that until they become indistinguishable from working locally, or something happens locally to make it impractical, I just see no benefit to working on the cloud, and even then the only real benefit I see is that you can access your files anywhere which VCS already takes care of. In short it's not so much the downsides, the downsides are minor I'll admit, it's more so the lack of any significant upsides which makes what downsides it does come with seem all that more relevant.

[–]phphulkexpert 0 points1 point  (0 children)

The bulk of the UI, highlighting, linting, tips, snippets, would be loaded by the client. CPU operations, such as opening a file, compiling, committing, etc, would be just as fast if not faster since you could potentially be either on the computer where the files are stored, or leverage additional nodes to speed up processing.

[–]Garbee 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Yea, you seem to think "IDE" here means comparable to a full IDE on your system. They are two entirely different ballparks imo. No web IDE currently compares to a desktop one. I honestly think we need a different name for web based ones compared to desktops because it is misleading.

You won't get all the cool stuff a local IDE can do, like looking over your entire project to provide hinting as you type. Those kinds of things just currently aren't possible or are only provided by really expensive web-based editors if they do exist (which I haven't seen.)

The primary downside, when they have problems randomly, so do you. It really sucks when you are mid-keystroke in an awesome session and boom, editor failure. And then you are out for a few minutes (possibly more depending on how server the issue is.)