The idea that everyone sees "lightweight" and they ONLY think of Chromium size seems an ascription of "lightweight" ONLY to chromium size. I understand that has been a more common approach to chromium based solutions. This is not it here.
I have said in a few of my comments that this is simple referring to "simpler".
See a definition of "lightweight" from wikipedia:
A lightweight programming language is one that is designed to have very small memory footprint, is easy to implement (important when porting a language), and/or has minimalist syntax and features.
So if we replace "lightweight programming language" with Chromely, while the small memory footprint, may be arguable false, it is however easier to implememt and minimal features. Note the "and/or" part.
There are a lot of potential reasons to use something like this, but having a main selling point of it being "lightweight" is just flat out lying or willfully misunderstanding what lightweight means.
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Javascript, and all scripting languages in general (maybe excepting lua and similar) are fundamentally not lightweight. They require enormously complex runtimes.
I'd say a reasonable definition of "lightweight" for an application runtime is if a complete, distributable app including all the required components can fit in 1 MB (This functionally excludes things like .NET too).
There are, or course, odd corner cases (using the OS UI components, etc...), but it's broadly applicable.
Other relevant bits to being lightweight - how fast is the application to start/stop? What's the minimum runtime overhead? etc...
Thanks for your explanation. If you read my intro, you will notice that Chromely was not started as an alternative to Electron, I was trying to solve a problem and over time I realized I came up with something that can be used instead of Electron (for .NET/.NET Core).
> Other relevant bits to being lightweight - how fast is the application to start/stop? What's the minimum runtime overhead? etc...
I have not had the bandwidth to check this. My hunch is Chromely may have some edge on this. But we leave that until it is proven or not.
> There are a lot of potential reasons to use something like this ..
I thought so too, so have many developers, thanks for pointing this out.
There are a lot of potential reasons to use something like this, but having a main selling point of it being "lightweight" is just flat out lying.