Sublime text still smokes Atom and VSCode in the performance arena.
Why isn't everyone using Spacemacs then?
Visual Studio is much, much slower than all of them yet its still an incredibly popular IDE for some reason. It has endless flaws, one of them being its still 32-bit and often crashes on larger projects. (The last game I ported to the PSVita would hang VS for minutes sometimes, often ending with out-of-memory errors, we'd reboot VS between every profiling session.)
For a good chunk of users, features and ease of use are more important than performance (especially when most of the time it really, really doesn't matter for an editor.)
Because people don't know any better, shun anything that isn't their pet technology and generally sit on the wrong end of the Dunning-kruger effect.
That is not a useful indicator. There's a reason that 'editor-wars' is a running joke.
This was the exact problem I needed to solve that led to my first Electron app.
Needed to recursively crawl a directory and generate a report on all pdfs found and the total pages in each pdf.
It seemed silly to learn a new language and ui kit when I could glue together some wen technology over a weekend and make it happen.
http://designbymobi.us/how-i-built-my-first-desktop-app-in-3...
The very same can be said about people looking down on Electron. Most of them can't write decent native apps to begin with.
I used all of win32, Qt, GTK, wx and Cocoa to name but a few. They all suck in one way or another. Suggesting people are poor native developers for refusing to learn these frameworks completely disregards the fact that most people using these frameworks are bad developers to begin with.
For the average application going native will easily triple your development time and costs for absolutely no noticeable performance difference.
> If you need direct hardware access it probably isn't well-suited to being a web app in the first place? Why use web technologies for it then?
What if the only difference between the web and desktop apps are that the desktop app can open local files while the web app downloads them? Are you going to write two apps in that case? This would be a mediocre economical choice at best as you're more than doubling the production costs for a difference nobody is going to care about.