I agree that Atom itself seems very slow, but VS Code tends to run great, and I really appreciate the feature set that it offers.<p>As it stands, it&#x27;s not a great use case for many types of applications, but I would say that it&#x27;s good enough for most of them.  Beyond this, people are building useful things with it quickly.  Far more quickly than they would be able to if they were targeting a custom UI platform, or with a lower level language like C&#x2F;C++ etc.  All this with the ability to relatively easily build for Windows, OSX and Linux deployments.<p>I don&#x27;t mind people using XML based UI composition, as it works pretty well.  Flex, XAML, and many other UI builders are XML based, simply because the structure corresponds well to the rendering hierarchy of components, and allows for easier understanding of their relative interactions.<p>I am half surprised there isn&#x27;t a path towards a ReactNative for Desktop (OSX, Windows, Linix) at this point, that is similar to Electron, Node&#x2F;V8 core, but with a common&#x2F;reduced component set that just works.<p>It&#x27;s worth mentioning that the underlying platform is C&#x2F;C++ based with a very flexible UI kit (HTML) and a DSL (JavaScript + DOM) that is also flexible.