Microsoft Open-Sourced Calculator | Hacker News Reader

Microsoft Open-Sourced Calculator

github.com

59 pointsSytten18 comments

This reads like those java enterprisey code style satire/spoof codebases.

Sure does.

https://github.com/EnterpriseQualityCoding/FizzBuzzEnterpris...

Can anyone link me a PERFORMANT universal app? fast startup, fast usage, the works. i've never seen one in the wild and even this calculator is kinda dogshite by those standards. is it just not possible on this stack?

I don't understand why this is downvoted. The most obvious problem with the new calculator is it's slow startup, noticeable also wits SSD.

It's a "your mileage will vary" subjective judgment that isn't particularly helpful as a constructive criticism.

For what little it is worth, and it is presumably quite little as anecdata in present company, I've never noticed any performance issues with the Universal version of Calculator, and "time until first keypress recognition" feels the same to me as Windows 7's Win32 Calc.exe, with the old synchronous window message pump "wait for the hourglass to stop spinning" of a classic Win32 window replaced with a usually very quick splash screen.

It seems to me just as likely that y'all've forgotten all the time you've spent waiting for spinning hourglasses in Win32 (good old, rose tinted glasses phenomenon that) when you deride Universal app performance. Sure, there are plenty of Universal apps that could use a performance tune-up, in general, but there are just as many (or more likely plenty more) bad Win32 apps out there whose terrible performance is papered over with hourglasses and the passage of time afforded by Moore's Law.

no i just moved onto using other calculators instead of sticking to the slow windows one. maybe you should look beyond the windows standards for actually good software. a splash screen for a calculator is utterly insane

When i type calc and hit enter, I espect that I can immediately type the number key strokes for the calc app, with no any pause between the enter and my first number keystroke.

I have a 8 core cpu, 32 gb ram, ssd. There is no any good reasoning for why I shoud wait for a calc app stratup.

More discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19321217

Has anyone heard anything about MS File Explorer getting open sourced?

I'm using a Lite version of Directory Opus from a Humble Bundle mostly because the MS File Explorer does some weird things with the left-side tree view. It would be awesome to fix + recompile that :)

(Side question: Is the file explorer it's own app, or part of the larger Windows GUI shell?)

WinFile is MIT licensed now, maybe you have confused it with File explorer -don't think that could happen anytime soon.

https://github.com/Microsoft/winfile

Aside: the Windows OneCore and Shell Experience and C-Shell refactoring efforts have done a lot of work moving File Explorer into its own application finally divorced from a lot of the rest of the GUI. You can see it in Task Manager in 10 versus previous, esp. XP: fewer miscellaneous Explorer.exe processes and more fun new components like Windows Shell Experience Host. (Hard-crashing Explorer.exe is a lot less devastating to overall the stability of Windows 10 than it was back in XP [or 95].)

So we seem to be a lot closer today to a world where File Explorer is just another app, and maybe even considerable for open source development, than you may imagine.

I hadn't heard about CShell. Thanks for posting!

Yeah, it's an interesting topic that Microsoft for multiple reasons is keeping mostly behind the curtain. I like following C-Shell rumors, as a Windows mobile fan (rumors are that it was hoped C-Shell would have been a lot faster to build and might have kept Windows 10 on mobile form factors "alive" longer), and also because it sounds like a lot of cool effort that will probably be underappreciated when it actually finishes.

Seeing the announcement about WinFile + Calc got me wondering about MS/Windows File Explorer.

Would you mind expanding on what you don't think MS could open source the File Explorer?

Note it's Managed c++/CLI, not old school original native c++1337. Why not just use C# then...? It's so much easier to write.

A lot of the guts of it are still the same ones that have been in C/C++ from the "dawn of time" of calc.exe. One thing to notice, for instance is that the "RatPack" infinite-precision rational library in the middle of the repository has a Copyright date specifically in it of 1995 and that seems credible.

(Also, it's C++/CX which is similar in syntax but different in runtime to Managed C++/CLI. C++/CX produces WinRT-flavor COM bindings, not CLR-intended IL code. It sounds like some folks are hoping to migrate it, now that it is open source and could be done as a community effort, to even more modern C++/WinRT which uses modern C++ features and does away with the need of special syntax.)

Oh you're right it is c++/cx. I saw that carrot pointer and jumped to conclusions.

Over 4000 stars. Nice.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com