Electron (software framework)

Electron (formerly known as Atom Shell) is an open-source software framework developed and maintained by GitHub. It allows for the development of desktop GUI applications using web technologies: it combines the Chromium rendering engine and the Node.js runtime. Electron is the main GUI framework behind several open-source projects including Atom, GitHub Desktop, Light Table, Visual Studio Code, Evernote, and WordPress Desktop.
Architecture.
Electron applications are composed of 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 HTML and CSS.
Both the main and renderer processes can run with Node.js integration if enabled.
Most of Electron's APIs are written in C++ or Objective-C and then exposed directly to the application code through JavaScript bindings.
Security.
Because Electron applications are web applications running in the Chromium engine, they may be vulnerable to web-related attacks such as cross-site scripting attacks, through the same attack vectors as a browser (e.g. Chromium) or other internal components (Node.js) if using certain versions of Electron. Examples of such vulnerabilities have been fixed in the 1.7.13, 1.8.4, and 2.0.0-beta.5 Electron releases.
Criticism.
Electron applications have been criticized for containing very significant overhead due to their Chromium dependency. Compared to native applications of similar functionality, Electron applications take up much more storage and RAM while being slower and providing a non-native user interface. A few alternatives have been written to use an existing browser instead of bundling Chromium.
Software using Electron.
A number of desktop applications are built with Electron including:
Offshoot.
Electron.NET.
On October 27, 2017, the community released a port called Electron.NET for the .NET Core framework. This is an open source project that enables native Electron APIs using the C# programming language. The .NET developer remains in their usual ecosystem, rather than using JavaScript.