> Is the speedup during editing or does it also improve startup time?

During editing/usage for sure: it is noticeable. Not that it was slow before but nearly everything now feels really snappy.

As for startup I don't know as I rarely relaunch it but I just tried (only for the native-comp branch):

    time emacs -Q -eval '(kill-emacs)'

gives 160 ms. Or launching Emacs with -Q and then calling emacs-init-time gives basically the same (-Q bypasses the config files).

Starting with my entire config which is quite beefy takes 1.2s. I could probably speed it up but haven't really looked into optimizing Emacs startup in a while.

Emacs has been pretty slow in editing, ever since Visual Code came along to set the bar higher. Good thing that Emacs is back in the game though, that editor has heart.

last I tried VSCode there was a noticeable input lag (keystroke to character on screen). Is there some trick to fix this?

I found it incredibly distracting. In Emacs... Magit is instantaneous while orgmode tangle/export is embarrassingly slow - but never a dealbreaker

anecdotally eshell has some of the lowest latencies as well https://danluu.com/term-latency/

I switched back from VSCode to Sublime Text (despite enjoying Intellisense) due to how much more responsive the scrolling is in Sublime.

Same here, maybe it’s only in my head, but for me subl is just better.

It is massively better in latency than any other editor I've tried. No surprise, since I believe it's C++.

Unfortunately sublime's plugin ecosystem isn't very lively.

I couldn't even type 2 chars in vscode on a 2nd gen i5. To be fair it's been decades since I've experienced that amount of delay. Thanks I guess

If you're have a problem with performance in vscode 95/100 times it's memory not cpu bound. Obviously emacs uses less memory than vscode, at least at base configuration.

Maybe, it's still incredible to think that memory pressure would create that much latency. And I'm not that picky, I use a hp48 calc (on which lag is almost a feature). I'm just shocked when people say emacs is sluggish while vscode flies.