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Comment by Timothycquinn | Hacker News Reader

For naysayers, Electron only has to support one browser flavor and one version, which eliminates one of the biggest disadvantages of building Web based apps. With Electron and similarly with nw.js, the performance can be close to par with native apps without the cross compilation issues of native c++ frameworks like Qt. And with Electron, if you want to write some native code in C/C++, you can integrate that also. The only downsides I see is protecting closed source code and the lack of Mobile support, which is not coming any time soon due to Apple blocking Google V8 engine from their platform due to V8's use of JIT compilation.

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Though at the cost of a ridiculous amount of processing overhead because you've chosen to forsake nearly every native programming feature the OS provides, in favor of an HTML engine

Native programming features the OS provides are also not free: it's still similar code drawing things on the screen, making sure they are properly aligned. HTML/CSS is a pretty flexible, and it indeed has some overhead compared to most native UI frameworks, but the "ridiculousness" of this overhead is imaginary.

> but the "ridiculousness" of this overhead is imaginary.

A few weeks ago:

VS Code uses 13% CPU when idle due to blinking cursor rendering

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13940014

That was a bug in Chrome (http://crbug.com/361587), it's not inherent to the technology. VS Code ended up implementing the logic in JS to work around it.

As someone who has been hit by every single one of these bugs[1][2][3] but somehow didn't get the VS Code problem I'm not at all convinced that is somehow inherent in using Electron.

I don't think I ever had a "IDE causing high CPU load in" problem in Delphi 2, 3, or 5. I did in Delphi 4, and I have in PowerBuilder, Sybase PowerJ (although there were much worse problems with that!), VB6, Eclipse 2, and I'm sure there are some I've missed.

Bugs suck, but they happen.

[1] http://ridikulouse.blogspot.com.au/2015/02/visual-studio-hig...

[2] http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1369487/speeding-up-tomca...

[3] http://stackoverflow.com/questions/38601171/intellij-idea-20...

"the performance can be close to par with native apps"

That has not been my experience with any electron app. They are dog slow across the board

Does that include VS Code? VS Code feels very responsive to me. I even replaced notepad++ on my Windows machines with it.

VScode is the best electron app I have used, but it still feels a little bloated, even on my very high latency display. We're just so spoiled with super responsive GUI toolkits, and that's how it should be, especially in an editor.

I'll stick with emacs for now, until I finish writing my own editor.

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