If an app is running on its own and not in a web browser, it is a desktop app. The language or framework it is written in does not matter. Do you consider VS Code a web page as well? What about Spotify?
If you don't see the browser it doesn't mean it isn't there. There's always some chrome instance rendering the html and interpreting the js. Extremely wasteful. (Right now Slack seems to use 600 MB ram on my desktop).
And yes, VS code is a web site by my definition. Not an application.
Not sure why you were downvoted. I agree with this definition. This is the main point of the whole discussion about the Slack client being bloated, consuming huge amounts of memory (and sometimes CPU) etc.
Sublime Text is 100% a native desktop application written in C++ with the Skia graphics library [1][2].
However, only a tiny fraction of Skia’s functionality is actually used, just for rasterizing lines and blitting images. Font rendering is done by using the underlying platform APIs to do the glyph rasterisation. The editor also exposes an ABI/API that plugins can use via Python scripts. C++ provides the cross-platform functionality, Skia provides the cross-platform UI, custom code was written to target specific parts of the UI in macOS (using Cocoa) and Linux (using GTK). A tiny web driver is used to render a super-minimal set of HTML tags for tooltips.
