If this was truly that simple, don't you think someone would have already done it? Furthermore, is there even an actively maintained, open source, cross platform, development-focused text editor with native UI components?
Someone already has done it. An one-man-shop built Sublime Text by himself.
Surely it's not having JS as an extension language as opposed to Python (the only difference between ST and what I propose) that's making it difficult.
>Furthermore, is there even an actively maintained, open source, cross platform, development-focused text editor with native UI components?
There's a "cross platform, development-focused text editor with native UI component" that's working great.
Whether there's an open source editor like that is orthogonal, since what I'm discussing is whether is technically feasible to create such a browser -- and the existence of ST proves that it is (and that's by a single developer: with resources such as that GitHub or even better MS, have, it would be much easier).
The choice of license is just a decision after that.
>> "Sublime Text 2 is mostly coded in C++ and uses a custom UI toolkit." ... [0]
How many other devs/teams are going to reasonably take that on.
(And how do you think the debugging story of his custom framework compares to Chrome Devtools).
This strikes me as a sort of devolving-human standpoint that might lead to someone in 2050 asking how anybody could possibly walk 10 miles unassisted.
In the past, small teams of talented developers have written an entire game + game engine + associated tools from scratch, countless times.
Doing in-depth custom UI development for the desktop as part of creating a text editor does not bin as 'Mountain-moving; Don't even try' difficulty.
Even on the I/O heavy workloads that Node/V8 should be able to handle best, Java is ahead: https://www.techempower.com/benchmarks/
And yes, there are many Java apps that like to eat memory but I don't believe it's as bad or worse than V8/Electron and I don't believe Java is as inherently memory hungry as V8/Electron.
That being said, as someone who's used both Atom and IntelliJ a fair amount (although my daily driver is Vim), you can definitely see the downsides of using the JVM vs V8 in terms of startup cost. People complain about Atom being slow to start, but IntelliJ is so, so much worse — elsewhere in this thread dstaley mentioned it being almost 4x worse on a test file, and in large projects I've seen IntelliJ take literally minutes to begin being usable. The JVM is optimized for long-running server processes that can afford time to boot and warm up; the V8 team spends inordinate amounts of time ensuring that JS can begin executing quickly, even sometimes at the cost of peak performance. And RAM usage in IntelliJ isn't pretty either.
I don't think using the JVM instead of Electron buys much (if anything) in terms of editor performance compared to writing in native languages, like Rust or C++, and using native GUI toolkits instead of Swing/JavaFX or the DOM.