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Discussion on: [HELP] Desktop Application Technology

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Meghan (she/her)

The thing with Electron is that it's just like normal web development. Making an app with Electron is super easy. Like as far as UI frameworks go, web development is by far the easiest system I've ever encountered. But with JavaScript comes some of it's faults and the drawback of making (almost) anything with web technologies is that for as easy as it is to get something up and running, it's very difficult to keep that performance up when your application becomes increasingly complex.

The biggest example of this I can think of is Atom vs VS Code.

Atom is an IDE made by GitHub (also the makers of Electron) and was a fantastic first example of what the platform could do. However, it is not the most performant app out there. Then, Microsoft came along and made Visual Studio Code, an extremely performant Electron app and now between its speed and extensibility, it has become the IDE of choice for many developers in the web space and more.

While I'm not trying to say you should definitely pick Electron for your app, I'm saying if you'd like to make a native app with web tech then Electron is a great choice, but it's going to take a lot of work to make a great app.