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On a wider scale, this is Scott Alexander's Moloch -- people who ship an Electron app now would outcompete people who would spend and 3x more on writing native clients for each platform in 3 different languages, and 3x as long to polish the codebase.

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Exactly.

Electron is just evolution at work. The OS vendors had decades to fix their system UI frameworks and make it easier to write cross-platform UI applications.

But they didn't because vendor lock-in was always more important to them, and that's how you get Electron. You reap what you sow ;)

Electron has gone a bit overboard with the 'everything but the kitchen sink' philosophy, but the basic idea of a platform-independent application development framework is sound.

I'm investigating free pascal and Lazarus to see if viable multiplatform UI framework. Certainly much smaller binaries

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