Conversely I've been a little unimpressed by some of the standout node-webkit applications. LightTable in particular just doesn't seem very smooth or easy to use when I actually sit down and use it.
sublime text? (which to be fair, is pretty amazing)
It's all relative. I've used plenty of really shit 'native graphics' applications (especially cross platform ones); on the other hand, plenty of stuff in the list (https://github.com/rogerwang/node-webkit/wiki/List-of-apps-a...) work just great for me.
shrug
I don't think you can discount the entire run time just one the basis of one app.
Light Table and Atom both run on node and they're pretty slow/jerky for me. Slow enough where I'd rather use IntelliJ for general purpose editing, intellij has a decent startup time compared to those two but it's way faster after that. Plus I always have it open when I'm working anyway so another tab doesn't really make a difference.
I run LightTable and PyCharm both side by side throughout the day as of a almost a year ago and I definitely feel the opposite. LightTable is much more responsive for me.
Although switching to an SSD made PyCharm a lot faster.
That may be the case honestly, I tried LightTable for a few weeks about a year ago and it was somewhat slow, it may well have gotten better.
I tried atom a week ago and it was extremely slow, much slower than LightTable. Almost 30s startup times and it was extremely slow at opening large files and even slower when trying to scroll through them.
I haven't but at a guess I'd say it's probably because Popcorn Time is a media app which makes it closer to any number of conventional HTML5 websites.
Whereas LightTable is an IDE, but the limitations of windowing and feature layout were showing heavily in it's interface. node-webkit to me, seems like it's good for a particular type of application interface, rather then something very general purpose.
cough lags-and-stops-responsonding-if-you-sneeze-too-hard-on-a-24GB-ram-machine-visual-studio-2013? cough
cough spazzes-out-randomly-when-you-type-characters-xcode? cough
sublime text? (which to be fair, is pretty amazing)
It's all relative. I've used plenty of really shit 'native graphics' applications (especially cross platform ones); on the other hand, plenty of stuff in the list (https://github.com/rogerwang/node-webkit/wiki/List-of-apps-a...) work just great for me.
shrug
I don't think you can discount the entire run time just one the basis of one app.