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> Doing the same with native technology would have took several weeks of coding, and it wouldn't have been cross-platform.

Actually, it would take one hour because you would use Poppler, and it would be cross-platform. It would also be faster than pdf.js.

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> Actually, it would take one hour because you would use Poppler, and it would be cross-platform. It would also be faster than pdf.js.

I don't really know poppler. If there are Poppler bindings for the language you are developing in, I believe you that this is possible. This is only one use case though, I'm not sure you will find native libraries in your language for all features that VSCode can offer almost for free, like live markdown preview for instance.

I don't think the implication you're making here is valid. In Electron you're forced to use JavaScript or a compile-to-JavaScript language. In the desktop it's pretty much the same deal but with C. And we've been doing C FFI since way before JavaScript was conceived.

> I don't really know poppler.

Exactly. Web developers live in a bubble, and because they don't know much about native alternatives, they assume they don't exist.

Note: I'm a web developer and I don't know poppler.

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