iOS 26 is very late to have acceptable performance in the framework that Apple promotes as what you should use. It should have had good performance from the day it was introduced.

WebKit have had great performance for a very long time now.

Why would any startup dare to use tech that only now got fast? Why not go with the battle tested WebKit?

It is also much easier to develop and test html pages than Apple specific tech.

Can you point to a single performant, high-quality SwiftUI-first app with a messages-like chronological transcript and correct scrolling behavior on macOS? The problems with AppKit integration are real and should not be dismissed out of hand.

They even used the distinction “native-like” in the block editor article - which is really good, by the way and explains this distinction in more depth - but edited their comment now and that article is the third link and its anchored to the performance section so you won’t see that unless you scroll to the top.

Their point is more that SwiftUI has generally poor performance. Lots of native Windows frameworks have poor performance as well.

Native UI development is a minefield. If you want to build an app today that will still run in 20 years without a complete rewrite in the UI layer you should probably use wxWidgets if you are committed to native - even if only targeting one OS. But that model is really only appropriate for building traditional desktop apps. I don’t think the market would accept a Slack or Notion built that way today.

At this point on Win32 Qt might as well be the native UI. They did a better job of maintaining a coherent visual theme that says "Windows" and fits the design patterns than the actual owners of the platform.

Unless you're on KDE where it's literally native?

> If you dig up an 18 year old Core 2 Duo box, upgrade its storage to a cheap SSD, and install Linux on it, it’s shocking how snappy and usable it is for most tasks… up until you open a web browser or Electron app. Then it all falls apart.

Can confirm. I'm typing this on such an old Core 2 Duo laptop running Debian and even with only 4GB of RAM and a mechanical HDD, it's still very fast for everything I do on it that doesn't involve Web browsers. Windows 10 is practically unusable on it however. The gazillion background things it insists on running bring it to a crawl, mostly stuck on disk I/O.

Agreed. I have a shitty laptop I bought at Micro Center a couple years ago for like $80. I bought it mostly out of curiosity since I wanted to see what an $80 laptop would be capable of.

I installed NixOS minimal on there and a few apps to develop, and it was actually quite usable. Then I installed Skype on there and it was horrible and laggy.

TFA actually says the developer couldn't figure out how to do this with native APIs, not that they're slower: "But I still cannot make a simple thing work properly: a chat with Markdown & the ability to select a whole message."

Electron ultimiately sits on native APIs, and has its own performance costs on top of them.

I don't know where's the improvements, give it has all the limitations, now scaled to rich text. That's not the direction that this component should get. It need radical new API that is not much compatible with SwiftUI API

If you can predict the future so accurately, why aren't you the richest man on the planet?

I am going to miss being able to host TypeScript in a web view however.

Meh. Flaming about this is so exhausting given that the war was already fought and we know who the winner is.

First, that's the typescript compiler, not typescript apps. And it was a ground-up rewrite effort (a very large one) with a specific eye toward improving the performance of the original, which was widely held to be sub-optimal for reasons entirely unrelated to implementation language. Suffice it to say that, hell no, you can't just transpile your code to Go and expect it to run faster. We all know it doesn't work like that.

But more broadly, landing with "Please don't use Electron" in the context of a comment about a MS product seems weird given the implementation framework of Microsoft's single most impactful new UI project of the last decade...

Just stop, basically. You lost. Use Electron. It works great and everyone else already does and proved you wrong.