Electron gets a reputation, fair or not, as a memory hog. "It's just a browser tab pretending to be an app" is the usual jab, and there's truth buried in the joke: every Electron app bundles a full Chromium renderer and a Node.js runtime, so the baseline cost of …

If you've ever used Visual Studio Code, Slack, Discord, or Figma's desktop app, you've already used Electron — even if you didn't know it. Electron lets developers build cross-platform desktop applications using nothing but HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. No native Swift, no C++, no platform-specific SDKs required.

This post walks through …