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Comment by sunaookami | Hacker News Reader

It's not made in React, only the "recommended" section is made with React Native which compiles to native XAML. No web technologies involved. And yes I will debunk this every time I see it :) .

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Here's the problem: your reply is factually correct, but it doesn't address the GP's overarching complaint - the start menu is simply not performant. And since the code powering the start menu is closed source, it is not possible to perform a benchmark to see if the react native portion of the start menu is to blame or if it is something else.

It's slower. It's laggy. The taskbar and menus need to be native code of the highest optimization. Anything less than instantaneous means that PMs, managers, coders and everyone there should not have a job working on OSes if they can't get this simple idea through their thick skulls.

I've shared this on HN before, but starting with Windows 11, they seemingly started making the new UI essentially a separate process that runs on top of the existing Windows 10 UI and just modifies it.

I learned this from a video where a guy was seeing how much of the Program Files folder you can delete before Windows breaks, and at some point it reverts to the Windows 10 UI.

https://youtu.be/BVIN_PJu2rs?t=565

This is even more insane than I thought. Truly madness. Everybody involved with that should be fired and sent to the moon as an experiment on how long does the human body survive naked on both the dark side and the bright side of the moon. At least we will learn something from those experiments.... (it's a joke but the point stands. Those people shouldn't ever be allowed to touch computers.)

They also don't run animations in a separate process since Windows 10 which means that under high load everything lags. In Windows 8.1 everything was buttery smooth thanks to DirectUI. macOS and iOS also run animations separately.

Isn't this how pretty much every evolution of windows design has worked? at least from what I remember the windows 10 ui is built on top of aero (though admittedly I don't use windows and have never interacted with it for anything serious)

I got so frustrated with how slow the file explorer got after my work laptop updated. Turns out the new UI is just shell extensions, if you add registry keys to redirect them to non-existent paths you get the old file explorer back.

> And yes I will debunk this every time I see it :) .

Being technically correct doesn't make it any less annoying, unfortunately.

Lying to "prove" a point and basing discourse on lies gets us nowhere. Windows start menu is not slow because of React. We should correct common misconception more often.

Could you write us a nice blog post or article with performance metrics to prove this?

You might be correct but at this point your statement is as much a lie as the parent.

As someone who as attempted to use React Native for Windows, I can tell you that the "native" XAML doesn't make things any better. If it was using web technologies I wouldn't need to manually modify RNSVG to fix segfaults when an SVG goes offscreen.

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