VSCode grew out of a project to make a browser-based IDE. So, when they decided to make a desktop-like user experience instead, Electron was the natural choice, as a way to make it a port rather than a complete rewrite.

You could argue that it's a similar story for things like Slack - for business reasons, they more-or-less needed to have a web-based UI. If you're already committed to that, then it makes sense to use Electron in order to maximize your code reuse.

I can't speak to Discord or Atom. Those ones make less sense to me, but there might be a reason there, too.

Speaking completely personally, Qt has never felt like a viable option for a commercial project to me. It does have some bindings for other languages, but, at least last I checked, they're all community supported. When you're talking about language binding libraries, it's reasonable to think of "community" as a polite way of saying "poorly". That can quite justifiably influence a person's willingness to rely on them for non-hobby projects.

I don't like JavaScript much better than I like C++, but at least I can more easily think of business cases for why I might accept being locked into JavaScript. The ones up above, for example.

> I can't speak to Discord or Atom. Those ones make less sense to me, but there might be a reason there, too.

Electron exists because of Atom (yes, in that order). Electron was previously called Atom Shell[1] because it was created specifically to house Atom, although they mention it wasn’t created just for that. If there’s one app that has a reason to be built on Electron, it’s Atom, because it was an experiment to see how viable that solution would be.

But even they understand that solution wasn’t the best because it’s slow, so they’re experimenting with a model where the application logic is written in Rust and only the UI is built with web technologies[2].

[1]: https://electronjs.org/blog/electron

[2]: https://github.com/atom/xray

At least part of the reason is probably the lack of a good layout engine that's more flexible than rich text and less complex than a web page. An embedded browser gives them everything they need for their highly stylized layout, but at a great cost.

You can do quite powerfull layouts with QML.

Discord also has an identical web UI.

that has less than half functionality (and across different browsers it may be even worse)

Qt includes JavaScript bindings. Python has commercial support. Java used to.

Electron is good for an MVP if you have or need a web app. Companies keep using it afterward because it commodifies developers and externalizes costs.

>Because those are companies dominated by webdevs that can't be bothered to learn anything else

I doubt Microsoft (VSCode) is in that camp. Or that that was the main concern of the others. And I think that's a facile explanation anyway: the same kind of companies flocked to do native mobile apps in the past -- but nobody much cared for QT on desktop still.

It surely is, given the amount of love JavaScript has gotten since WinRT introduction, TypeScript, and Channel 9 sessions mostly done by newly hires.

Efficiency is more important for mobile apps.

I would argue that VSC beat faster and more mature editors for one simple reason -- intellisense. All the other editors allowed the seductiveness of intellisense to go unanswered for years.

Otherwise I'm not sure why most people care about the internals of their editor.

The Visual Studio Installer was rewritten from a native app to an Electron one.

They had a native app. They decided to throw it all away.

it's amusing how they managed to make the new installer as bad as old one was

Can you elaborate on that?

The JavaScript camp inside WinDev managed to get Electron to replace the WPF installer for VS 2017.

> Because those are companies dominated by webdevs that can't be bothered to learn anything else.

Tell me about it!