1. I haven't heard anything about it recently but that doesn't mean work isn't continuing on it. Xray wasn't supposed to "fix" anything really, it was a fairly extreme experiment to see if it would be worth going down that path.
2. No, and it's not trying to be, as "speed" isn't their top priority, extensibility is.
That being said, the days of opening a 5mb file and the editor getting brought to its knees are largely over (unless you have poorly written extensions which can still take everything down, because again in Atom extensions are EVERYTHING and can do ANYTHING).
The primary reason VS Code took over Atom was because of Speed. It shows what is possible with Electron. Not that it is anywhere near the speed of Sublime Text, but it was good enough for most and at least bearable to me. Compared to Atom, all the feedback ( on most Internet forum at least ) are performance related.
I tried 1.36.0 and found it pleasantly faster than I remembered, especially the highlighting on large files. I would. Startup-time is still painfully slow, but it feels like once it is "up and going" it's just as fast.
It's just a difference in strategy. If Atom started restricting what plugins can do in a way that VSCode does, i'd drop it in a heartbeat, since that is the biggest reason why I use it.
The ability to literally customize everything, the ability to replace the built-in plugin that enables tabs with a different one with different features, or the ability to create and use plugins like git-time-machine, or the ability to have full offline documentation with popular libraries baked into the editor, or the ability to write a plugin that turns the editor into an SQL ide allowing me to highlight and ctrl+enter a statement and have it run in a local DB while developing to test some stuff and show the results in a new pane in the UI, or a browser plugin (and editor plugin) that allows me to type this comment in my Atom instance and have it mirror to the web textbox so I have all my normal shortcuts and keybindings, or even just tweak a plugin yourself locally in a few minutes.
For example I run a somewhat unique setup for a current project where I'm running an IDE tool in WSL (the linux subsystem) in windows. The IDE tool runs in the linux layer, but my editor (atom) runs in the windows layer. The editor kicks off the tool and tells it which files to run on, but the paths are different on the 2 sides. So I quick pulled down the plugin, modified it to convert the paths back and forth correctly, and linked it locally and i'm up and running in literally half an hour. that kind of thing isn't nearly as easy in other editors like Sublime or even VSCode in many cases where those tools are either built-in to the editor, or need to use a specified interface which would make this kind of thing much harder to accomplish.
The fact that it takes 5 seconds to startup doesn't bother me at all, and in usage it's more than fast enough for just about everything I can throw at it (again, excluding poorly written plugins that can ruin things sometimes). At most I open my editor a dozen times a day (normally once or twice), but switching to VSCode where plugins are more limited in what they can do (for performance reasons mostly) would cost me significantly more time each day in just switching windows to do things that I used to be able to integrate into my editor.
And at the end of the day, it doesn't need to be perfect for everyone. I get that most people don't want to spend the amount of time that I did and still do customizing and building my editor from plugins, and for them VSCode is great! And still others like yourself value startup time significantly (whether you just enjoy it more or you have a workflow which requires it doesn't matter), and in those cases something like Sublime or even others might be better! It's not a zero sum game, we can all coexist happily!
1. What happened to Xray? The Next Generation of Atom that was suppose to fix all the performance problem of Atom.
2. Is Atom as fast as VS Code now?