Why Idealyst over Electron?Electron made desktop cross-platform tractable for a generation of web developers, and that's a real contribution. The trade-off it asks for is the one Idealyst is built to avoid: every Electron app ships a full Chromium browser around your code.
Real native softwareAn Idealyst app on macOS is an AppKit app. On Windows it's a Win32 host (in progress). On Linux it's a GTK host (in progress). There's no Chromium between your UI and the platform's window server — buttons are the platform's buttons, scroll views scroll the way the OS scrolls, the menu bar is a real menu bar.Where a target has no native toolkit to drive — embedded surfaces, custom GPU pipelines — the framework's wgpu backend renders the same primitives itself. Same author tree, different bottom layer.
No bundled browser runtimeElectron's resting baseline is roughly the weight of Chromium plus Node — every app ships its own copy. That's the cost of giving each app a sealed browser environment, and it adds up across install size, memory footprint, and update bandwidth.Idealyst's desktop builds are a native binary linking the framework directly. No embedded engine, no per-app runtime to ship or keep patched against browser CVEs.
Reads as belonging to the deviceNative accessibility focus, native text selection, native keyboard handling, native drag-and-drop — these come from the platform's own widgets, not approximations layered over a webview. Users don't have to consciously notice it, but they feel it when something behaves the way the rest of their OS does.