> I always encounter the exact opposite. I've never found any web application with a good UI or any web application that outperformed a native one.
VS Code seems to outperform all the other IDEs I've used in the past
VS Code seems to outperform all the other IDEs I've used in the past
Its great and in most ways feels like a native app, but this is a very different experience than every other Electron app I use which all tend to leak significant amounts of memory over time (VS Code does this too but to a lesser degree), lock up in weird ways (task still running in task manager but any attempt to invoke a new UI window results in nothing happening until I go and manually kill all the zombie tasks running in the bg), etc.
Additionally the terminal has to use WebGL to achieve usable performance.
Which is exactly the point—the UI is written in HTML/CSS, not the native platform language, and the high-performance modules are written in C++ and Rust, also not the native platform language.
MSHTML and XUL eventually lost into obscurity, Electron will follow their footsteps.
I invite you to consider that the converse may be true: if you can keep things performant by RIIR or even C++, it makes a great case that desktop apps should resemble web apps, with a native backend talking to a JS/CSS/HTML frontend. It does not function as a cautionary tale, but as a compelling proof-of-concept.
As usual in this industry, those that have been around long enough have already been through this fashion statement.