It's true that JavaScript costs, but the text renderer in Chrome is just wildly optimized and definitely can outperform an OS list view. An article here on HN covered it a while back.

▲ doodlesdev 16 hours ago | parent | next [-]

   > the text renderer in Chrome is just wildly optimized and definitely can outperform an OS list view.

The question is not whether it can win against GTK/Cocoa/WinUI but whether it's faster than other retained-mode renderers such as the one Discord is using, GPUI.

Also, even if just running on a browser tab, each tab has a lot of memory overhead compare to what an actual binary running on the OS has. That's memory that gets wasted from the outset, before the developer even writes a single line of JavaScript.

▲ andypants 15 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Doesn't it use skia? You can use that in your own native app

	▲	StilesCrisis 14 hours ago \| parent [-]
		It does! And yes, you could, but Skia isn't a widgets library, it's an immediate mode renderer. You would be on the hook to write the entire widget layer yourself. That's in fact what Chrome provides (tied to a very popular widget library known as HTML!)

▲ SaintRomuald 16 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Do you have the link to it or remember what it was called?

	▲	StilesCrisis 13 hours ago \| parent [-]
		https://skia.org