VS Code is one of the worst apps out there? Every time a VS Code release is posted to HN, the app gets almost universal praise for the rate of development and feature support.

Here's an example of a thread from the April update: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14267424

Electron is a resource hog, but is CPU/RAM really at much of a premium? I run VS Code and Slack on a used Macbook Air from 2012 without issue while also running Chrome and other processes.

Compared to BBEdit, Sublime and Notepad++, Code is terribly slow. It behaves nothing like the OSes I try to use it (subtle, but very important).

I believe this to be true, but by how much I am curious? Anyone have benchmarks to point to? Generally curious as I am a web developer who loves the idea being able to finally make desktop apps. Thanks

What does “able to finally make” even mean? Who stopped you in the past? If you want to make desktop apps, learn desktop technologies. Or do you mean “I’m lazy and/or inconfident to learn anything other than JS”?

There are many articles on the subject. For instance: http://josephg.com/blog/electron-is-flash-for-the-desktop/

> I am a web developer who loves the idea being able to finally make desktop apps

Don't force square pegs into round holes.

Personally I found it incredibly slow, the interface is riddled with high latency input and response.

> CPU/RAM really at much of a premium

On laptops they are

Especially battery life. After removing all the Electron garbage from my MBP, I have seen a considerable increase in batter life.

Electron-based apps make me cringe, too, but you are ignoring their strong point: it's probably the easiest and most reasonable way to make cross-platform GUI apps today.

I'm a macOS developer, and there is no way I would ever use something like Electron to make a Mac app — it would be inferior, in all sort of ways, subtle and otherwise.

But there is also no way I could create a great native Mac app, and a great native Windows app, and a great native Linux app, unless there was a relatively massive development budget (of time, which generally implies money).

You shouldn't be comparing Electron apps like Slack to the nonexistent high-quality native Slack app, which Slack would never build, and therefore exists only in your imagination.

You should be comparing Electron to other frameworks that deliver cross-platform apps across the major desktop platforms: basically, Java and Qt.

I run Slack and VSCode all day; no, they aren't as nice as good native Mac apps are, but they are about as nice as the Java-based JetBrains IDEA tools that I also use.

“About as nice” = Not nice at all. Can you say why you'd use Code over BBEdit or Sublime? Is it just the price?

Slack works just as “well” on the browser, so why should I take a considerable performance and battery life hit for a webview, when the dedicated webview already provides all the functionality I need?

I pay for both BBEdit and Sublime, and typically have both of them open, so it isn't the price that persuades me to use VS Code. It's that it is better for certain specific tasks. The one that springs to mind is working with Angular projects written in TypeScript. For those projects, it handles autocomplete, and as-you-edit code linting, better than the other two (or basically any other editor).

As for Slack, I'm not really a fan, but I use their app because its easier to find with its own application layer compared to being one of a hundred browser tabs I might have open in my various web browsers.

(That's the same reason I use Epichrome to make dedicated Chrome-based browser apps for GitHub, CircleCI, JIRA, and some other tools... macOS gives you a slew of useful tools for dealing with things at the application level. You can absolutely do all the same stuff in a browser, but it's not as convenient when it is intermingled with all the other stuff going on in your web browsers.)

The GitHub desktop app, at least on Windows, is built on .net, not Electron.