Yep. Electron is the worst way to make a desktop app… except for all the others!

I just wish there was a native Markdown renderer / editor library in C that I can use cross-platform - in the style of something like IMGUI (where the library outputs a list of primitives for you to render yourself in any graphics API).

Or well... since we now have Claude I might have a jab at this someday in my free time.

How is "performance" defined? Does it take into account the amount of memory required in each case?

Not just text. Try to build a ui where you need non-trivial and non-standard behavior and SwiftUI will fail. AppKit is still better in this regard.

I've had pretty much the same experience with my AI chat app. Nothing works well. Markdown rendering is slow and laggy, streaming is slow and laggy, everything locks up the UI. I've tried at least 5 of the most popular text editor components for UIKit and SwiftUI on GitHub, and all were broken in one way or another, buggy, and slow as well. It's ridiculous.

Show your code, or show you the door. There are so many native Mac and iOS apps out there right now perfectly capable of rendering Markdown and streaming text. You just gotta wonder what is this guy’s excuse.

I remember being a junior engineer in 2015, and being asked to render a clickable link within a paragraph in an iOS app. Swift had just been released so we were still entirely on the ObjC/UIKit stack. It was an absolute nightmare. I _barely_ managed to make it work. I haven't really touched iOS since about 2016, so I assumed the new SwiftUI stuff would have this stuff built in. Obviously. Kind of insane that it wasn't.

This is where QT/JUCE can help. Although you are limited to c++.

I don’t recall ever struggling with NSTextView. I never really got into Swift, but I’ve never found Cocoa / Objective C to have any of the problems the author mentioned.

Not exactly sure what “streaming” text is, but serial terminal software has been handling incremental text rendering and updating for decades, without performance struggles.

Kotlin MP is also pretty decent on Mac

You can just embed a web view in your app, though?