Comment by DanielHB
oh wow, I was very wrong, I don't know why I got this notion that electron shared the runtime environment between non-browser and browser code. Thanks for the clarification.
I am pretty disappointed about this, it severely limits the usability of native code from inside the UI code and makes Electron much less attractive compared to Tauri, Wails or similar alternatives.
Do you know if at least moving objects between the electron processes uses direct memory-copying and not some heavy-handed serialization (Wails for example serializes to JSON). The links you pointed out don't mention that.
You were correct. Electron lets you expose specific NodeJS APIs via the preload script or everything via the ‘nodeIntegration’ setting:
https://www.electronjs.org/docs/latest/api/structures/web-pr...
Separately the IPC lets you do zero copy in some circumstances via Transferable objects such as ArrayBuffers. Structured cloning is efficient but not zero copy, and json serialisation shouldn’t be used (since structured cloning is easily available).