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I think this is often the perception - and I understand why, because I shared it for a very long time - but I don’t think it’s true.

Building a simple UI for multiple platforms may be somewhat more time consuming than a single cross-platform Electron implementation. This will scale with the complexity of the UI.

This particular application has about the simplest UI imaginable. Consume some keystrokes, render some rows of text. Implementing this is any native UI platform will not be hard - but it will reduce the memory footprint, rendering time, and application bundle size.

Native UI frameworks are actually really good at rendering simple applications on their platforms. There’s usually plenty of documentation and good development tools. Building an application using one of them is definitely different from web tech - but I don’t think it qualifies as hard. And I reckon it would be useful for more of us to experience as many different platforms as possible - it’s a great way to learn!




The native platforms backed by real money also have lots of official documentation, real GUI builders, high quality debuggers built into their IDE’s and one cardinal way/library to do something. The importance of all this stuff in speeding up things can’t be overstated.




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