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Comment by idiotsecant | Hacker News Reader

How does this happen? How do you build a fundamental OS control in react?

Plenty of stuff nowadays uses Webview2 across Windows.

Not only has Project Reunion been a disaster (moving UWP regular Win32), apparently Microsoft new employees lack Windows experience, being raised in Chromebooks and Macs, apparently they aren't getting the trainings they should.

You can go watch recordings of the community calls, and see puzzled faces when asked about Windows capabilities not yet supported on WinUI/WinAppSDK.

apparently Microsoft new employees lack Windows experience, being raised in Chromebooks and Macs, apparently they aren't getting the trainings they should.

They should be given Petzold's famous book on the subject, published by Microsoft Press itself.

Yeah, certainly.

considering that they have still Russinovich and Raymond Chen in their midst it shouldn't be too hard to have a two week boot camp for those who write programs for the OS

Russinovich nowadays is busy with Azure, AI, and overseeing the Rust takeover at Azure, where 60% of the server load runs on Azure Linux.

Even Dave Cutler seems having some Azure Linux fun, with repurposed XBox Cloud racks for AI research, as per his Dave Garage interview.

No one left who can use whatever half deprecated native actually-not-that-native windows ui framework is currently undead state of the art and not enough examples in the llm‘s to vibe code it.

That leaves „web technologies“.

This is what I'm wondering. How dysfunctional is microsoft that they shipped a react-based start menu? It reads like satire, "Windows 11 is so bad that even microsoft doesn't use native controls".

MS also made one of the most hated IM and audiovisual meeting applications with web tech, replacing a previously (not great but much better) native one: Teams.

Teams was pretty bad when it released, but it's decent now I think.

It’s still randomly really slow (like, individual controls drawing one by one slow) on my recently-refreshed corporate laptop; and opening Teams was the last action before the entire Windows installation my personal laptop was nuked… but yes, it’s basically usable and reliable for video calls and team chat these days.

Still no threading support.

It's not React. It's React Native. React Native and React are about as similar as JavaScript and Java.

React Native is a way of orchestrating a UI comprised of native controls.

It's still baffling, since the core idea of React only makes sense as a workaround for limitations of the browser DOM. Wrapping much more flexible 'native' widget frameworks with a React layer is pure cargo culting (same with SwiftUI).

It tried to solve cross-platform development. That’s a legitimate issue.

In retrospect, calling it React probably caused more problems than it brought benefits, and makes little sense - like Java vs JavaScript.

But React Native looks like plain React. Syntax the same in both cases. Java and Javascript are wholly different languages.

ok, granted, but microsoft already builds a first party way to orchestrate a UI comprised of native controls. Why do they invest so much effort into WinUI and C# if they're just going to use a 3rd party solution? Presumably the windows 11 start menu does not need to run on macOS or Linux.

Because it uses C++, and C++/WinRT tooling for UI development isn't there.

The team that killed C++/CX, said it isn't their problem that there aren't Visual Studio integrations like C++/CX, and eventually left C++/WinRT in maintenance and nowadays is responsible for windows-rs repo. Better not expect too much from that repo as well.

Welcome to Microsoft politics.

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