While someone else labors for something "slow and clean" to invert your analogy, Electron itself is improving. And many electron apps can be cleanly hosted on a browser environment, which further puts them out of reach.

What's interesting to me is that for every successful cross-platform app I can name, it has a custom UI (and in some cases custom runtime) engine around it. That's great if you have the engineering capacity to swing it. I'm not sure many do.

I wish we had a great, open source cross platform GUI toolkit that didn't mandate the use of C++. I don't think it's easy to suggest using C++ is reasonable for the vast majority of app devs. It's increasingly specialist even in its main domains.

And I'm not in that "let's use JS" echo chamber. Look at my submissions to see where my affiliations lie. I just cannot deny those folks can pull off better looking, better specified, and more accessible products for a fraction of the total effort.overrides this. I refuse to handwave that away.

Meanwhile, I can think of a dozen native apps that behave better than Slack or Spotify or Atom, just to name a couple of obvious examples.

There are much better things to complain about in my pick of Electron apps. Here's one - VS Code is a highly specialized app from a field in which users are perfectly ok with highly non-native UI. Sublime, IntelliJ IDEA, NetBeans, Emacs, Eclipse, etc are all deeply non-native yet popular. So that's a bit unfair but hey, there are Qt-based dev tools out there as well. But again, I'd be happy with any example of a non-shitty (UI/UX-wise) Qt app.

Uh... the entire KDE Desktop Environment and surrounding ecosystem? Of those, KDevelop and Krita are both fully cross-platform.

I've listed many others in other comments.

Frankly, I think you're either choosing not to look, or moving the goalposts in order to rule out perfectly fine examples of native cross platform apps that aren't written in glorified web browser.

The entire KDE desktop runs on Windows. So it does count.

> One good reason is because it doesn't appear to produce better apps.

So an order of magnitude lower RAM and CPU usage doesn't count as "better"?

Depends on the absolute values. In and of itself, it's not better if it doesn't noticeably improve ux. Applications are for users. They're not vying for space in a VM, so up to the point where they don't impact a normal user's workload on a representative machine: no it doesn't count for much.

Maya (the high end 3D animation package) switched to Qt a few years ago.

It's not the same type of app as Spotify or Slack, but is comparable to VSCode.

Fair enough, but this is hardly representative of the sort of things Electron does well. What's more, Lyx and Telegram aren't exactly famous for being accessible apps.

It's very difficult for me to envision why someone wants to work 4x harder on an app to cut the memory footprint from 2g-4g (much of which is actually shared with the browser you've probably got running anyways) to 1g.

People demand respect for less able hardware, but I use Electron on 8 year old computers without complaint. And all I can hear in this is the emacs vs vi stuff again.

To be fair: I have seen various good QT apps, but most of them were not standard desktop apps. Instead they used fullscreen QML for highly custom user interfaces. That seemed to work well, but I think JS/HTML5 would do the same.

That seemed to work well, but I think JS/HTML5 would do the same.

With the same memory footprint and CPU utilization? I highly doubt that...

It's a powerful and memory-efficient IDE written in C#/Mono.