Hacker News Reader

Pretty much. Why would I use this instead of vanilla Electron?

It bundles the PHP run time for you.

How awful.

Meh. Compared to electron itself it’s probably not much. But calling it native is kinda weird.

I like PHP, bit even I have to ask... Why not just use JS that comes with electron rather than bundling a third party language?

Because of Laravel and Livewire.