Announcement: The Atom Text Editor has been Able To Edit a 2,000,001 Bytes-Long File [possible satire]

1 April, 2017, Tel Aviv, Israel: GitHub Inc. is proud to announce that their flagship text editor, Atom, was finally able to edit a file sized 2,000,001 (= 2 million and one) bytes. “This is really exciting.”, said one company representative. “After deploying Atom on an HPC machine with 256 GB of RAM, custom compiling it for full utilisation of resources, and waiting for 30 minutes, we were able to load such a large file. We then pressed a key, waited for it to think for a minute, and watched it crash with a segfault. Success!”

Industry experts are claiming that this will allow Atom, which was first released in 2014, to finally catch up with the Vim text editor, whose 1993 version could comfortably edit files over 100 Megabytes in size.

GitHub next plans to try to tackle the difficult problem of getting Atom to edit a 2,000,002 bytes file. For this, they plan to implement the following changes:

1. Upgrading the computer's memory to 2 Terabytes of RAM.

2. Converting the code from CoffeeScript to VBScript.

3. Switching from the Electron software framework to a new framework titled “Positron”, which will embed a browser inside a GUI window, use it to run a JavaScript x86 emulator, run Linux inside, and then simply run vi there.

“We hope that will be enough.”, GitHub say as they embark on the remarkable task ahead.

• List of Text Editors and IDEs - also on this site.

• Building Vim from 1993 today

• xkcd: Real Programmers

• Vanguard about real programmers.

• Benchmarks showing Electron apps are super slow and eat memory like there is no tomorrow - Reddit discussion about benchmarks of GNU Nano, Vim, Sublime Text, Atom and Visual Studio Code.

This document is Copyright by Shlomi Fish, 2017, and is available under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-ShareAlike License 3.0 Unported (or at your option any later version).

The Atom logo is part of the Atom package by GitHub under the MIT/X11 license, and taken from the English Wikipedia.

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