speedmark vs Electron: 6 MB, 45 MB, 0.18 s

Most Markdown editors you can install today are websites wearing a desktop costume. That is not a criticism of the people who built them: shipping one codebase to three platforms is a genuinely good deal. It just comes with a browser engine in the box, and you pay for it every time you open the app.

speedmark goes the other way. It is a native Rust application that draws its own interface with egui. There is no Chromium, no WebView2, no WebKit — nothing between the editor and your operating system.

The three numbers that matter

Those are order-of-magnitude figures taken from how each stack typically behaves, not microbenchmarks run on one specific laptop. The exact numbers move with the machine; the gap does not.

Where the weight actually comes from

An Electron build ships an entire Chromium runtime. Before you write a single line of product code, you are already carrying roughly 150 MB of browser.

The size is annoying. The memory is worse. Chromium is not one process — it is several, each with its own heap and its own garbage collector. An editor that should be a text buffer and a scrollbar ends up managing a renderer, a GPU process and a handful of utility processes.

And startup is where you feel it most: a browser engine has to boot before your first keystroke is even possible.

What egui changes

egui is an immediate-mode GUI library. Instead of building a retained widget tree and reconciling it, speedmark re-describes the interface every frame and lets the GPU draw it. Two consequences matter here:

• There is nothing to boot. The window is up as soon as the process is.
• There is no web engine to keep alive. No renderer process, no JavaScript heap, no idle memory tax while you are just reading.

Coupled with a lean Rust release build — LTO on, codegen tuned for size — the whole application lands at about 6 MB and opens almost before the window frame finishes drawing.

What we gave up

Being honest about the trade-off matters more than the benchmark table.

• We cannot reuse web UI code or drop in an npm component library. Every widget is drawn by hand.
• Text layout, IME behaviour and accessibility come from the GUI toolkit rather than from a mature browser engine, so they take more work to get right.
• The ecosystem is smaller. When something is missing, we build it.

For a focused Markdown editor we think that is the right trade. A text editor does not need a browser; it needs to be fast, and to get out of the way.

Try it

speedmark is available as a one-time purchase — $6.9 during the launch window, $9.9 afterwards. No subscription, no account, no sync server.