Electron is bloated because it's vendoring two major pieces of software (chrome and node). The binary size and memory footprint can be solved with some minor help from platforms (already in progress - see webview). Web itself is more than fast enough for GUI, and is incredibly optimized, both layout and js engines (or wasm, if that's your thing).
Good points, but you're missing something: the web platform is incredibly and intrinsically complex, and any complete implementation is going to necessarily also be complex and consume a minimum amount of resources. I would need to see some empirical evidence that this minimum amount is low enough so as to not be noticeable on 10-year-old hardware.
That is - just because Electron will get faster with some optimization doesn't mean that it's possible to become enough faster while still completely implementing the various web specifications.
> the web platform is incredibly and intrinsically complex
Absolutely true. I don't like that the web is so complex there are only a few competing implementations. Still, it's the best we got in terms of platform support.
> doesn't mean that it's possible to become enough faster
Unless you bloat your app with tons of frameworks, I don't think the issue is speed, but size, which is true for web in general. Almost all of that size can be deduplicated (and some big parts even discarded).
Very good point about the difference between speed and size wrt webtech applications in particular - I completely agree, I think that frameworks are the cause of power efficiency/performance issues, but that the platform isn't intrinsically slow.
