Electron for Desktop Dev

Electron (formerly known as Atom Shell) is a developed and maintained by . It allows for the development of desktop applications using web technologies: it combines the and the runtime.

It was originally built for . Electron is the main GUI framework behind several open-source projects including , , , , , Desktop, and .

Electron applications comprise multiple processes. There is the "main" process and several "renderer" processes. The main process runs the application logic, and can then launch multiple renderer processes, rendering the windows that appear on a user's screen rendering and .

Both the main and renderer processes can run with Node.js integration if enabled.

Most of Electron's APIs are written in or and then exposed directly to the application code through bindings.

Performance

Applications built with Electron can take up more storage and RAM, and may run slower than a similar app built with technologies native to the operating system.

History

In September of 2021, Electron moved to an 8 week release cycle between major versions to match the release cycle of Extended Stable and to comply with a new requirement from the that requires browser-based apps to be within 2 major versions of the latest release of the browser engine.

Electron actively supports the latest three stable major versions. From September 2021 to May 2022, four major versions were temporarily supported due to the change in release cycles.