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Comment by solid_fuel | Hacker News Reader

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".

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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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