Author here - thanks for the kind words! Yes, your comment hits the nail on the head and echoes my thoughts exactly. Electron happens to be a great way to test out some of the thoughts and I ideas in an economical way - especially since my time to work on Oni is limited at the moment.

And I think the fat headroom for improvements is important to call out - when people talk about "Electron Bloat", they usually refer to one of 5 things:

1) Footprint (space on disk) 2) Memory usage 3) CPU usage (corresponding to battery life) 4) Responsiveness (esp typing latency) 5) Startup time

As you mentioned, across the board, there's a bunch of room for improvements - especially with tech like WebAssembly on the horizon! #1 and #2 are the hardest, because Electron will always have a fixed overhead - but when comparing to an IDE like Visual Studio, it's not over the top.

For my workflow, #4, #5, and #3 are most important, and Oni still has plenty of low-hanging fruit to tackle for each of those. If I find there is a blocker to getting to acceptable typing latency and startup time, I'd consider making a switch (potentially to a react-native-on -desktop solution), but I'm optimistic that with WebAssembly, React 16, Chrome 61, along with optimizations on the Oni side, there's still plenty of opportunity to improve performance.