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Are there easy ways to write GUIs without Electron that still can use HTML+CSS for layout and design that allow you to have an identical experience on Windows/MacOS/Linux? I think this is the main thing webdev-land people like (myself included). Also, there are so many npm libraries to handle stuff for you that staying within that ecosystem is enticing.

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My point was more along the lines of the code bloat that comes from essentially emulating a web browser on system, when in reality you can write much faster code in C/C++ or even C#/Java. But, GUI design for applications can be a nightmare, with QT on the one hand versus fragmented Cocoa/Windows Whatever in C#.

I think Electron was the webdev community's response to this, and we really haven't gotten one on the app/systems developer side besides QT.

Or to rephrase, using Electron to "emulate" a web browser is cross-platform from the perspective of the electron user, while most other gui-ing solutions in C/C++, are not necessarily cross-platform, and therefore this leads to different set of challenges.

I have been waiting for this for a long while, a downsized and embedded lightweight html+css+js engine will solve all desktop GUI porting issues.

or just bundle a html/css/js with a single go-http-server-executable that use browser as the GUI interface.

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