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Writing GUI apps is painful period, and it’s become more so not less in the last two decades.

Go back in an emulator some time and try Visual Studio or even old Borland from the 1990s. Point, click, add code, set style, and the result was not bad at all. The whole UI looked consistent too with uniform controls, shortcuts, etc.

Today UI apps use 100X more memory, are slower, and are harder to use with little to show for it in terms of improved functionality. The whole desktop is a disaster of conflicting designs and accessibility or uniformity are practically gone.

Mobile is kind of shocking too. Here was a chance to dump cruft from desktop and do things better but the result really is just as much of a pain in the arse if not more. Consistency is a little better but the developer experience is awful and of course unlike desktop you really can’t develop on the actual device. That adds another layer of shit.

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Say what you will about VB6 but it was stupid simple to get GUI apps up and running.

It was stupid simple to get simple GUI apps up and running. More complicated apps were impossible. But, I think that's exactly what's missing in the Desktop GUI market right now. Webapps are incredibly easy to start apps with. You only need to know a few things and you can pick up the rest later as your app gets more complex. Modern desktop GUI systems are incredibly complicated, in comparison, just to open the window, let alone put text on the screen.

Later versions of Visual Studio with custom controls and other abstractions made fairly complex GUIs entirely doable and still pretty fast to build.

Then they shit canned everything for Xaml around the same time the whole industry abandoned any kind of WYSIWYG or rapid development technology.

> Today UI apps use 100X more memory,

Larger memory footprints aren’t just from the GUI. There is a lot more functionality to deal with everywhere. Just handling modern security, encryption, and certificate checking stack can take up more space than entire executables from the early 90s.

I also have literally 100X more RAM now.

> are slower,

Im fairly certain everyone who says this has simply forgotten how slow mechanical hard drives were. I occasionally have to pull out a very old laptop, hope that it still boots, and do something on it. Everything is so painfully slow in ways I forgot about. It’s refreshing to return to my modern PC.

> and are harder to use with little to show for it in terms of improved functionality.

If you don’t think modern apps have more functionality, I don’t know what to tell you.

> Im fairly certain everyone who says this has simply forgotten how slow mechanical hard drives were.

Absolutely, but I would go even further with this. I can't prove it, but I would bet a lot of money that Windows 10+ has made using a spinning disk even slower. I would guess optimizations around disk access were entirely different in the XP era compared to now, when it is assumed everyone has an SSD.

Anyway, I had an old laptop that ran like absolutely dog shit. I put an SSD into it and it magically became usable again.

I assume OP means slower on like-for-like hardware, rather than slower when run on a PC from the 90s, but to be fair the WinForms/WPF component of old GUI's was very fast even on legacy hardware.

Your profile doesn't list your email, so I'm posting here... is this the paper you were looking for? https://depts.washington.edu/acelab/proj/dollar/index.html Your original post for context: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26152600

It was!! That’s absolutely amazing, what a surprise after all these years :)

Many thanks for hunting me down in some comments!

Awesome, I'm so happy to hear that!

> There is a lot more functionality to deal with everywhere. Just handling modern security, encryption, and certificate checking stack can take up more space than entire executables from the early 90s.

What does this have to do with bloated GUIs?

> Im fairly certain everyone who says this has simply forgotten how slow mechanical hard drives were. I occasionally have to pull out a very old laptop, hope that it still boots, and do something on it. Everything is so painfully slow in ways I forgot about. It’s refreshing to return to my modern PC.

I remember 98/XP running circles on mechanical harddrives compared to modern PCs on ultra fast SSDs. The fact that despite thousand times faster hardware we have slower performance is disgusting.

> If you don’t think modern apps have more functionality, I don’t know what to tell you.

Care to provide an example what modern applications have that older ones lack? Except for always—on connection and artificial bullshit imposed by modern OSs.

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