[westoncb]

I have built a couple Electron apps, one of which will be available as a commercial product soon.

The main advantages (over executing your app in-browser) to my knowledge:

1. You can execute native code outside normal browser sandbox

2. You get your own application window

[wlesieutre]

You can even have multiple application windows! But VS Code is the only one I can think of that bothers.

God forbid you want to be in two Slack orgs at the same time, perhaps on different virtual desktops. Off to the browser version with you!

[httpsterio]

That's just bad usability on Slack's part, not a technical limitation of the tech. Also, afaik Slack is/has moving away from Electron.

[wlesieutre]

Agreed on the bad usability, but that's par for the course with most Electron apps. You get the laziest possible "stuffed a webpage in a window" UI. And maybe it's even a nice UI in some ways, but it's usually pretty clear that it's not native software.

Re: moving away from Electron, not as far as I know. They had a major update a year or so ago to make some big efficiency gains by not running a separate Electron instance for each organization, but the new version is still in Electron: https://slack.engineering/rebuilding-slack-on-the-desktop/

One can hope that they'll take the iPad version and make some improvements to let ARM Mac users get that instead, but currently they've chosen to disable downloading it from the Mac App Store.

[polishdude20]

Wait, you can execute say c++ using electron?

[westoncb]

Yep: https://www.electronjs.org/docs/tutorial/using-native-node-m...