You're comparing apples to oranges. Lua is a language runtime. Electron is a full browser and a language runtime.

If you want to compare them then compare node.js or JavaScriptCore to lua. Or compare Electron with a lua runtime that has a webkit/chromium engine integration.

I don't especially like Electron, and sometimes like writing lua, but the two are not solving the same problem or competing in the same space.

Actually, for a while Java was just below Cocoa for "nativeness" the LAF for it was maintained by Apple itself.

I'd heard that before! I kind of debated whether to put Java or QT first—it came down to the fact that QT apps just feel closer to me on macOS. Although I don’t know how ugly they are under the hood.

Edit: What does LAF stand for?

LAF stands for "look and feel", which is basically Java's name for "UI theme". Another fun fact: Cocoa had official Java bindings at some point!

The Java SWT toolkit uses Cocoa native widgets under the hood. So it is a native UI toolkit. That said, like parent said, native doesn't necessarily translate to a user experience of being performant.

The rest of the application, being in Java, will often means it will have your typical JVM high memory usage and slow startup times.