Obviously bundling nearly all of Chromium with an app is inherently inefficient, but out of curiosity's sake, has there been any objective analysis of exactly what makes this use a seemingly disproportionate amount of resources? Are JavaScript runtimes inherently inefficient? Is it Electron's node.js part? Is it the huge amounts of code needed to parse and render HTML and CSS? Is it the multimedia features, like WebGL and the video and audio players? Is the problem actually just badly written code running on top of Electron? And if so, what exactly are are most Electron apps doing wrong that one could avoid? Is it, as this blog post seems to suspect, that they aren't sufficiently taking advantage of Electron's node.js integration?
In addition, once the actual bottleneck has been identified, doesn't this open the door to fix things on the WebKit/Blink engine side of things? Before, when Electron was managed by GitHub, one could say this would be unreasonably difficult, but now that GitHub is owned by Microsoft, isn't tweaking Blink to be more suitable for deployment environments outside of Chrome exactly the type of thing they would have a vested interest in doing, and the resources to actually pull off? After all, with VS Code, they are one of the highest-profile Electron users, and using Blink in Edge presumably involves working with the Blink code to some degree anyway.
It's always struck me that a lot of Electron apps likely never use a single line of WebGL, while a lot of WebGL apps likely only use DOM APIs to pretend the DOM doesn't exist by plastering everything in a huge <canvas> element, and both likely don't want their binaries to include the Chrome devtools, but Electron includes all of these things anyway. I'm not sure how much space or resources it would actually save, but is Chromium/Blink refactoring their code and build process to facilitate Electron building different Electron "profiles" that include different sets of features even remotely a possibility?
In addition, once the actual bottleneck has been identified, doesn't this open the door to fix things on the WebKit/Blink engine side of things? Before, when Electron was managed by GitHub, one could say this would be unreasonably difficult, but now that GitHub is owned by Microsoft, isn't tweaking Blink to be more suitable for deployment environments outside of Chrome exactly the type of thing they would have a vested interest in doing, and the resources to actually pull off? After all, with VS Code, they are one of the highest-profile Electron users, and using Blink in Edge presumably involves working with the Blink code to some degree anyway.
It's always struck me that a lot of Electron apps likely never use a single line of WebGL, while a lot of WebGL apps likely only use DOM APIs to pretend the DOM doesn't exist by plastering everything in a huge <canvas> element, and both likely don't want their binaries to include the Chrome devtools, but Electron includes all of these things anyway. I'm not sure how much space or resources it would actually save, but is Chromium/Blink refactoring their code and build process to facilitate Electron building different Electron "profiles" that include different sets of features even remotely a possibility?