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No, and that's fine. I don't think anyone is going to begrudge a small team the power of developing a 'desktop' application using cross-platform tools like that. It's great that the barrier to developing an application in that way is lowered.

But that doesn't excuse the abuse of that platform. Spotify used to have a pretty convincing native Mac app, which was spiked in favour of their current abomination, and I've watched performance plummet.

Using Electron as a cost-cutting measure is fine, but it's not good for user experience and it's OK to be honest about that.



Electron is great for user experience. Compare to something like JetBrains' IDEs which are written in Java and are much less native feeling than Atom (and just as resource-hungry).


But JetBrains's IDEs are a fair bit more powerful than Atom. The resource-hungriness is taken up by functionality, not UI.


To be fair though, Java and Swing which JetBrains IDEs use are also not exactly native.


Comparing Atom and IntelliJ is like comparing a BB gun to a 155mm howitzer.




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