My everyday work is in Java, JavaScript everyday, I wouldn't use Java in my free time for sure. But I do like JavaScript now with Babel/TypeScript. I did in the past worked with wxWidget and pyGTK but I found that building UI with React is more convenient and flexible.
UI performance are on par for this type of application, plus fetching file information from node is also pretty fast. But if I ever encounter performance issue, it's quite easy to redo the bottleneck in c/c++ with node. And pretty soon in the browser with webassembly.
Memory consumption is less than my Finder process (with all the opened helpers). But if I compare application like VS, VSCode and Intellij. Electron memory usage should be in between a C++ and Java apps.
The challenge would be to make it start/open really fast (now for the prototype it's like 1 second). But I guess it's possible to do the same thing as Nautilus/Windows File Manager/MacOS Finder and have a background process running.
Before the line between language and framework were more sharp. But I think with the evolution of the language and framework like electron, the line is getting a bit more blurry. Great apps could be written in electron as they can be written in a native framework. End users will be the real judges.
The main benefit of Electron is the community. Everybody knows HTML/CSS/JavaScript, so can write extensions / customisations. If I were Microsoft, that's how I would have justified Electron.
Still, I personally much prefer Sublime Text :-D
Emacs also has a client/server architecture so I can spawn the emacs daemon and then connect to it from anywhere.
We have a few people in VSCode at work, a few in Sublime and yet more in Atom. They're all very happy with their setup :)
Aren't they doing exactly this? [1]
That would explain why this is the first time I hear about it :)
It's not really a port though, just another piece of software labelled "Visual Studio something-or-other".
For the very reason you outlined - startup times. The average use-cases of file managers are being opened and closed very often. Electron is rather aimed at long-running applications you don't usually restart, like Atom and VSCode.
Microsoft could've ported VS to other platforms, yet they chose Electron. I'm sure they spend quite a while analyzing the requirements and looking at alternatives as well before settling down.
The end result is very lightweight compared to VS and does almost everything users require. VS still starts a lot slower than VSCode for one.