Tracking Issue: Desktop application

The Graphite desktop app is designed to bring native rendering performance to users and improve the ergonomics for file access, font loading, and other APIs that have limited or no browser support. Web and desktop will both remain first-class platforms.

Web technologies, via CEF, are used to render just the editor UI to an offscreen texture, which is then drawn to the same window as the native viewport render. Thus, only the GUI utilizes JavaScript, and that code is already built to be thin and lightweight, allowing the interface to remain snappy and fluid (both on web and desktop) without negatively impacting the user experience of working in the natively rendered viewport on desktop.

This tracking issue organizes the work that has and will go into developing, stabilizing, and releasing this feature. If you're awaiting the desktop app, feel free to subscribe to this issue and check back as more sub-tasks get completed.