[nathansobo]

An embedded scripting language is only part of the story. Think about all of the APIs the browser exposes. For starters there's the DOM... there's no UI toolkit more that's more universally understood. Then there's CSS. Look how many Atom themes there are out there because people can tweak styling with a system they already understand. Then there's the long list of other standardized APIs. WebRTC, fetch, WebGL. Chromium is a very full-featured cross-platform environment that offers us more than embedding a scripting language would. I'm not denying it doesn't come with some negative trade-offs, but I do think those will diminish as Chrome improves and we improve our usage of Chrome... we're also dropping critical components to C++, which Electron makes it easy to do, so over time Atom will evolve into an increasingly "native" application with a cross-platform standards-based interface layer. The overhead of that layer will always be there though.