That's exactly the gain we're finding here by updating VS Code. Because there's essentially a thin VM layer running these apps, they are slower and less energy efficient than apps compiled specifically for Apple Silicon. To hedge against this, they built a recompilation layer into MacOS called Rosetta, which allows Intel apps to run on the new chips. Thankfully, engineers at Apple were smart enough to know that asking every Mac app developer in the world to recompile their apps for Apple Silicon will take a very long time.

Apple found massive performance benefits from their migration to a new chipset, but running software on the new processor architecture requires app developers to recompile their software for the new chips. These chips are fundamentally different from the Intel processors that Apple was using on all of their computers until recently. In 2019, Apple released their first round of computers that run on their own processors, which they call Apple Silicon. If you were previously running an Intel build, this is all you need to do. The fix: Download the latest version of VS Code for Mac, install it. This is because previous builds weren't natively compatible with Apple Silicon, and ran Intel code through a virtualization process that apple calls Rosetta. If you are running Visual Studio Code on a Mac with an Apple Silicon processor (also known as an M1, M1 Pro, or M1 Max), you will get a massive performance boost by installing an Apple Silicon optimized build of VS Code. So, how did I do it? Let's cut to the chase: The Solution

On a cold boot of VS Code, my load time went from 15 seconds to just about 2 seconds. Yesterday I stumbled on something that let me load VS Code 775% faster than before on my Mac laptop. I was pretty happy with the startup speed I gained by removing a fewĮxtensions, but VS Code still took a while to load. Note: This is an update to my recent post, How to make VS Code load faster with a little bit of housekeeping.

Visual studio code runs m1 macs