I have a hard time believing that companies like Discord are using Electron simply because they do not know what they are doing.

I completely agree with you. It would be extremely odd for a company like Discord, who has done things like using nightly Rust in production, to naively choose Electron because they "don't know what they're doing" with native apps.

Many people on HN either don't understand or don't care for trading off runtime performance and other technical qualities for other things like e.g. development speed, DX, easier hiring, etc.

Or to put it another way, HN users tend to strongly value things that aren't important to most people, and not much value other things that most people do care about.

Or to condense it further, HN users are human.

No matter how much we deny it! :D

That's true. But I think that many people here share such a similar perspective that they don't realize how fringe their priorities really are.

Maybe, although I suspect most people here understand that we're a fairly small subculture. I do, at least. The thing is, it doesn't matter if my opinions/needs/pain points are fringe. They're still real, and I still care about them and advocate about them. Just like most people.

> Many people on HN either don't understand or don't care for trading off runtime performance and other technical qualities for other things like e.g. development speed, DX, easier hiring, etc.

Most people on HN understand those tradeoff very well but also understand that those tradeoffs are being optimized for the company's profit and not for the good of society overall. Without meaningful competition (and for Discord that would mean interopable clients, not just alternate chat applicaitons with their own servers) the incentive for making more efficient software is ~0.

Discord was developed as a messaging system for gamers who usually have the latest and greatest hardware.

Electron would be okay for them and their users on account of that.

Question is, if you want to do cross platform UI what choice do you have?

There are a few options depending on your application type. Fltk is old and ugly, but may work for you. There are others that come from the world of game UIs. Things like sdl2, Nuklear, and dear imgui. I’ve also seen some vulkan based frameworks (mostly from the rust community)

Point isn't to make some hacky game ui, it's to make application UI on par with Web, feature and stability wise.

The vulkan based gui that neovide seems to come close to what you want. But I don’t think it’s a library you can use easily.

Which one of these would allow you to build the discord UI as it is, looking exactly the same on every OS and run in web browsers?

Why should an app look exactly the same on every OS? That seems like an awful idea.

Especially when that look & feel suffers because it's the least common denominator of all the supported systems.

Tk, it somehow manages to looks equally awful and alien on every platform, but isn't a total pain to work with.