I don’t think Electron is entirely to blame e.g. I tried the Discord app and it was amazingly snappy (just install both Slack and Discord and you can feel the difference).
Just compare VSCode with Atom - both Electron apps, both text editors, both extensible in JS.
I can't realistically measure input lag and stuff, but for example... With both having lots of extensions doing approximately the same, startup time is order of magnitude different. (And once upon a time I thought Emacs was bad in this regard, huh)
I actually really want to know how Discord does it. Do they actually use the DOM, or just draw everything themselves?
Honestly, anyone who hasn't used Discord, I'd recommend installing it just to try it, especially if you're a SPA web developer or you work with Electron. The performance beats native apps, even dealing with very long sections of text that need to be swapped in and out as you scroll.
However they're doing it is probably the way we should be building Electron applications industry-wide.
> Do they actually use the DOM, or just draw everything themselves?
The DOM is fast — what's slow are toolkits or poorly structured code which issues many redundant or poorly timed updates which forces the browser engine to do unnecessary updates.
