This is cool but it makes me wonder about all of the electron apps that are coming out. Is there something more efficient that could do the same? Why are QT and GTK not nearly as popular?
Because the people who are building and releasing these Electron apps are not interested to learn GTK/Qt; simple as that. Same reason why JavaScript is so "popular" because it's easy [1] to learn and — with the help of these other projects, Electron just being one of them — it becomes very easy to develop "cross-platform" applications.
Imagine being a 12 years old interested to become a desktop application developer, and then someone comes and gives you the option to spend several hours learning GTK/Qt with C++/Python, and then another person gives them the option to learn JavaScript (a language that is daily giving something to talk about) with Electron, what would be your choice?
[1] If you disregard all the ambiguity of the language.
"More efficient" how? At saving developer time? At producing shippable end products? At debugging? Will using GTK result in a better product that increases the end-user's "efficiency" more? Or will it really result in the developer shipping a product with 1/10th the features, or nothing at all?
Funny how you mentioned nothing of the computing resources required to run any of these. Sometimes it's alright to spend more time creating a product when the end result uses less CPU and less memory. It's not all or nothing.
If it makes no notisable difference to the user and cost you more time, you are just wasting time that could have been spend better on improving the users experiance.
Because the people who are building and releasing these Electron apps are not interested to learn GTK/Qt; simple as that. Same reason why JavaScript is so "popular" because it's easy [1] to learn and — with the help of these other projects, Electron just being one of them — it becomes very easy to develop "cross-platform" applications.
Imagine being a 12 years old interested to become a desktop application developer, and then someone comes and gives you the option to spend several hours learning GTK/Qt with C++/Python, and then another person gives them the option to learn JavaScript (a language that is daily giving something to talk about) with Electron, what would be your choice?
[1] If you disregard all the ambiguity of the language.