Falsehoods HNers believe about how people buy/use software. Didn't stop Slack/Discord from become ubiquitous.
"But native tho" just becomes a circlejerk. Talking about what users care about, most people don't know what native means nor if a given app is it. They don't know if Zoom is using more memory or CPU than it "should".
Other than VSCode for Rust and TypeScript, my own personal computer is as much Electron free as possible.
So don't mistake market share for freedom of choice.
The important thing is features - which VSCode has, and the speed at which those features are developed and deployed on all platforms - where VSCode is nearly peerless.
If developers cared about performance and resource consumption above all else, no one would be using VSCode right now (you included). They’d be using vim, emacs or perhaps Sublime. But that isn’t the case.
So why does HN keep flogging the “electron is bad” meme?
Also, I wonder how much the Electron love overlapps with VSCode, after all many of those developers were pushing for Atom before VSCode was born.
I think Microsoft chose Chromium for Edge mostly because they have big plans for Electron.
I'm just saying users don't care. They'll still use software that has the features they're looking for, on the platforms they use, as long as performance is acceptable.
I'm pushing back against the idea that performance nuts on HN who won't install a single electron app are somehow representative of the population at large.
Edit: a word missing
Indeed, even Java and .NET are improving their AOT stories, while available since the early days, weren't as widely deployed as they could have been.
How many people know that Slack is battery draining monstrosity?
The only people that pay for Slack are companies. The definition of Enterprise Software is where the user is not the customer.
In the famous words of Jobs about Dropbox -- chat isn't a product, it's a feature.