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That is called PWA.

Electron apps are as native as PWAs, with the caveat that they bring a 300 MB runtime alongside with them.

I bet there are still more Swing applications in production than VSCode users.

That doesn't make JAR a de facto packing format.




The point is that existing solutions in practice, however bad they might be, will always beat better solutions which only exist in theory.

Electron apps (or, fine, PWAs) will become the standard model for WASM development because that model already exists, and is what developers will most readily use... and because most of the interest in WASM comes from the web development community. By the time something better comes along, it will have to fight against the network effects.


Electron is not the same thing as PWAs.

I don't need a 300 MB pro application.

There is already a perfectly fine browser on my system.

Actually four of them.


Electron has a lot more features than PWA and we don't want more features in browser because of security. The result is, we need electron and will keep using it for native apps


That would be perfectly okay if the electron developers cared even just a little bit about memory consumption. Last time I checked there were major memory leak issues related to caching (contrary to popular belief caching things that are never accessed again doesn't increase performance).


I surely don't need Electron and plan to only use it on the few cases where I don't really have an option, where a proper Web app or an actual native application aren't available as alternative.




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