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A tremendous amount of effort has gone into the CLR towards optimizing interface dispatch, because at one time it was slow. Interface dispatches are cached at the call site to avoid real virtual (vtable) dispatch, just like a Smalltalk or JavaScript VM would.
The standard solution is that the write barrier updates a card table, which generally reserves a bit for every page. When it comes time to mark through old-to-young pointers, the collector scans the card table - if it sees a bit set in the card table, it must mark through /all objects/ on that page - even if only one of the objects on the page has a cross-generational pointer.
I'm a longtime Emacs user and I dabble with atom and code. The main thing that I get out of GUI editors is that extensions generally just work. I spent a lot of time debugging emacs extensions to the point that I kind of expected extensions to not work right when I install them - especially ones related to autocompletion. Nowadays I use spacemacs to keep my package management sane, but it's inflexible and complicated.
I miss things from Emacs sometimes so I keep it around. I miss macros, I miss some of the more stellar Emacs packages (Tuareg for OCaml and Cider for Clojure in particular) but I do a lot of editing nowadays in Atom and Code.
UWP C# apps are AOT compiled, the startup hit isn't that bad nowadays.
I got one of these in November and primarily run Ubuntu on it, and I'm really happy with it. The only thing that (really) sucks is that Suspend/Resume is broken, so you get a kernel panic if you shut the lid. Otherwise, it's wicked fast (compiles LLVM in 10 minutes and CoreCLR in about 2 minutes) and the display is really nice.
The only gripe I have with the layout of the keyboard is that sometimes the palm of my hand grazes the touchpad while typing, which on Ubuntu causes a click and moves the mouse cursor - a minor annoyance when typing but easily undoable.
The Ubuntu installation process is a little dicey but some person on the Ubuntu forums posted a detailed list of instructions and they mostly worked for me. Upgrading the kernel did not fix my suspend/resume problem, though. (http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=2301071)
The battery life is not as stellar as a macbook but I don't mind. It can last through a flight across the United States, so that works for me.
I'm running Ubuntu 15.04 and I haven't tried any of those things. My suspend/resume experience isn't like that blog, though - what happens to me is that I shut the lid, the os "suspends", I open the lid again and get an unresponsive black screen and I have to reboot.
This is almost exactly what I've done to set up my machine: http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=2301071&p=13382949#... . This thread claimed that the kernel v4.3 fixed this issue, but it still happens for me - I was going to wait until the next 4.4 RC to give it another whirl.
Maybe it's a good time to share this - I just bought a brand-new Dell XPS 15 and it runs Ubuntu like a dream. The only problem I've had is that suspend/resume (i.e. closing the lid) causes a kernel panic, but I've heard that's fixed in the next kernel release.
And the best part - no bogus certs!