> every time I'm surprised at how fast it is for a JavaScript app That shouldn't be surprising. Ivan Kutskir (the Photopea guy) is not an NPM programmer. The

> every time I'm surprised at how fast it is for a JavaScript app That shouldn't be surprising. Ivan Kutskir (the Photopea guy) is not an NPM programmer. The slowness that you're accustomed to today from the modern Web and the average Electron app is not a JS problem. It's a modern-Web-and-the-average-Electron-app problem, i.e., a doing-it-the-NPM-way problem. JS runtimes are fast, and well-written programs written in JS are fast, too. (In fact, mediocre programs were generally fast enough even when the runtimes weren't especially performance-focused.) The problem is that mainstream JS development took a left turn around 10 years ago. We have enough evidence by now to say that this really is the ailment. What happened is that what the community considers best practices today are actually bad practices. If you look at the serious applications of JS that otherwise break from the NodeJS/NPM crowd's conventional wisdom (incl. Firefox, Gnome, and projects like this one, for example, that don't buy in as heavily on GitHub trends and other résumé-driven development), they're snappy. Indeed, they're snappy enough that many people are generally not even aware that it's JS (or, in the case of Photopea, wouldn't know it if it weren't for the obvious/unavoidable indicators of what's behind the curtain).