[andai]

Does anyone know if there are any lightweight alternatives to Electron in the works? Or if such an idea even makes sense?

[type0]

It does make sense, not a lot of people seem to be interested though - https://github.com/pojala/electrino

[virmundi]

There are a few options.

http://alternativeto.net/software/electron/

One thing about these is that Electron can be optimized. I believe that one of the Visual Studio tools uses it and has dramatically lower memory than slack. Slack just doesn't try to improve performance.

[noloblo]

Like to see Alternatives to electron as well - even super optimized electron on code Atom and Google Chrome are quite heavy on a MacBook Air

[m-j-fox]

I remember XULrunner was fine like 15 years ago on a Pentium II. A lot less features and performance tho.

[enturn]

If you don't mind doing your UI in canvas (maybe with react-canvas) then these two look interesting, although Nidium doesn't seem to support desktop anymore. https://www.nidium.com/ http://impactjs.com/ejecta

[Can_Not]

Also, any election alternatives for desktop that specifically don't use a browser DOM? Something like react native for Linux/osx/windows or QT.

[bmarkovic]

There is Brig (https://github.com/BrigJS/brig) but despite the fact that QML and JavaScript are already "married", and the immense popularity of both Qt and JS, it's far, far, away from Electron's maturity.