[maxbrunsfeld]

That's one good reason that you might choose to use Electron, but it's not the main reason that Atom uses it.

One of the main goals of Atom is to be the most hackable text editor ever. Given that goal, Electron is the ideal platform for the app. Thanks to node's native module system, we can cleanly drop any component we want down to C++, while keeping our main application logic written in the most widely-known (and fastest-executing, thanks to V8) scripting language in existence. I'm happy with this architecture as opposed to starting in C++ and then bolting on some specific, limited scripting APIs.

To be sure, Atom has performance issues that remain, but we're making steady progress on them, and Electron isn't standing in our way at all.