A bit off-topic but I wonder if it is possible that Electron team distribute something like the VS C++ Runtimes on Windows? And release patches for different versions/updates?

Haven't used a Windows machine for a while but I remember there were bunches of different VS Runtime version installed on my PC before. Some app installers came with a runtime installer, but if the required runtime version was installed it would just use that one. I think this might somewhat reduce the installed app size for Electron apps as at least some stuff got reused.

There has been discussion of this idea. https://github.com/electron/electron/issues/673

You can approximate this somewhat today by distributing only an .asar or .zip archive of an application package and encouraging:

    npm install -g electron
    electron ./myapp

Or as npx gets more widely deployed:

    npx electron ./myapp

That's not a particularly "robust" way to install applications and you can't use native libraries outside of the base Electron distribution, and you'd mostly only be useful to devs with NodeJS already installed, but it's an option of a sort.

(It still won't share as much runtime memory as you might want, but it would reduce install footprints at least.)

There's also experiments like electrino [1] to force more use of platform webviews since all of our platforms have a webview built in anyway, trading some additional testing for bundling Chromium everywhere.

I'm surprised that I haven't yet seen a fork of electron-windows-store [2] that makes use of the UWP webview, as that seems an obvious enhancement to me. The Electron remoting between webviews and Electron code is already setup well enough you should be able to run the Node app as a UWP background app and use UWP remoting.

[1] https://github.com/pojala/electrino [2] https://www.npmjs.com/package/electron-windows-store

I really think the auto completion benefits can easily outweigh the performance penalty of running a term on top of Chromium

It's just the matter of personal preference I guess... I have good enough completion for terminal with my current ZSH configuration. (I am not fan of auto completion even in IDEs and editors) One thing I need from few tools that I use everyday (terminal and text editor) is as low latency as possible, I get really irritated by all those few ms of lag that are visible after keypress, I don't know why. So any Electron app is no go for me from the start, so I decided to stick with Vim and Emacs. Only GUI editor that blew me away by it's performance is Sublime.

So long as you're down for 20 minutes of battery life.

You can have similar completion using zsh-autosuggestions, it is easy to configure. However, improving performance is difficult.

Clearly I ought to dig into the zsh world

Why are you waiting? I’m already using Alacritty.

Not the person you're responding to, but when I tried it early this year Alacritty used more CPU and memory than gnome-terminal, and felt less responsive. It was also somewhat glitchy with my usual tmux+text editor configuration. VTE has been around since at least 2002, and in that time it's received a great deal of attention. While I'm always interested in new terminal emulators, catching up to VTE is going to take an awful lot of work.

There was an issue earlier this year caused immense slow down on Linux that is already fixed. You may try it again now.

Indeed? I may try it again. I've also been fairly impressed with kitty (not the MinTTY based kitty, the other one), which also uses the GPU, and is written in Python of all languages.