The problem is that, just like Java, electron wins at the end of the day in terms of market share. If we're in the business of helping people, we can do more "good" by making an inferior technology slightly more bearable. Of course, that is just one perspective (not mine but one that I'm trying to understand as well).

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It reduces software development costs, allowing more software to be written. There is plenty of software that needs to be written that doesn't exist today. Reducing costs helps with that need.

The other side of that is software that already exists, running in the background unnoticed. Things like your graphics driver. You wouldn't want that written in Java. If it were written in Java you might get a lot of features faster, but it sure would perform like crap. For core software like that, development costs are secondary. Performance matters first.

At the end of the day I think we need projects like neovim and oni. Editors are old technology and should be core software. Performance in my editor matters. I have five different IDEs installed and I still use vim.

> The problem is that, just like Java, electron wins at the end of the day in terms of market share.

The hell are you talking about, Electron still doesn't come near the marketshare when you look at acual apps using other cross-platform GUI toolkits.

I don't think Java ever "won" in the cross-platform GUI application space. Sun tried hard and Swing was successful in terms of being able to produce a reliable, cross-platform experience that was reasonable. But in terms of developer mind-share and actual applications on the desktop, I'd say it's success was pretty meager. Aside from IntelliJ and NetBeans and Eclipse (yep, I know, SWT) I'm hard pressed to think of other popular Java GUI applications.

I really like the idea of React Native... similar JS engine constructs, but a leaner UI layer... though, really need a bit more unity in UI controls across platforms.

Another bit seems to be some work in progress from the Xamarin guys at MS.

In the end, an XML based UI combined with a JS runtime engine seems to be a very powerful combination... getting similar points of integration with other languages could be equally nice.

Something resembling Material Design, or Bootstrap as a cross platform UI toolkit with an XML interface would be a great place to start. Electron really seems to be as close as it gets for the most part, with the least cross platform effort.

The deeply flawed framework being HTML/CSS, JS, Node.js, or all of the above?