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Comment by kristianp | Hacker News Reader

> benchmarks (like this one: https://github.com/Noemata/XamlBenchmark), WinUI 3 is currently measurably slower than both WPF and UWP. WPF is 20+ years old and even it is not native!!!.

Older stuff is generally faster because it had to be built in a more resource poor time. Maybe the WinUI devs should be forced to work on systems with the Minimum System Requirements. Heck, maybe all Microsoft development should be done like that, so that some focus on performance is there from the start, instead of as an afterthought.

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If I recall right, Windows 8 and Windows Phone 7/8 during the 2010's were all developed on low end devices.

Both had huge issues UX wise, specially desktop, but performance and stability was never a issue.

Developers should always test their system on the minimum system requirement that they allow the system to be installed...

I remember I complained about WinUI performance years ago, and they told me at the time that "performance" was not the focus...

I am sure this was posted so many times before but someone should reverse engineer the windows 8 era windows phones. Those were ridiculously smooth compared to android and ios with just 512mb of ram.

WP was incredibly smooth and they were willing to reinvent UX from first principles in ways that'll to this day make me reach for Sailfish OS if I didn't need physical buttons, but I must bring up the desktop version of Windows from that day.

I'll never forget the Asus Netbook proudly boasting about its 1024MB of memory via a colorful sticker that'd be considered excessively large on a 17.3" workstation, somehow running Gimp with multiple layers on Windows 8 alongside a few Chrome tabs without a care in the world. UX of 8 and 8.1 was awful, but it was optimized and stable in ways that made me hopeful for what MSFT would deliver in the future. 1gig of memory, a spinning hard drive and a single low powered x86 core were enough to get some image editing for a then school course done with some wiki pages in the background. I'd hardly believe it, had I not lived it. 10 and 11 have been regressions in my book.

I never used 8 because I hate the UI. But I used 7 for a long time. I recall that 7 was blazingly fast on a 2GB notebook back in the early 2010x. But then that was already way beyond its minimum system requirement.

> UX of 8 and 8.1 was awful

The UX of Windows 8 was amazing on tablets, to the point where it's still my favourite touchscreen UI. The keyboard+mouse UX wasn't very good though, which is all that >99% of users ever used.

> 1gig of memory, a spinning hard drive and a single low powered x86 core were enough to get some image editing for a then school course done with some wiki pages in the background. I'd hardly believe it, had I not lived it. 10 and 11 have been regressions in my book.

I had a similar experience with the earlier releases of Windows 10 also [0]. I'm not really sure when Windows's performance got worse, but it was definitely some time after that.

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45743066

It’s after the 2019 release, they started optimising for ssds.

I’d argue they started doing that a bit earlier. My hard drive from 2011 made using Windows a miserable experience any time the search indexing or windows defender scans kicked on, no later than 2016-2017.

That isn't "optimizing for ssds" that's simply irresponsible product development.

I think android apps bundle pretty heavy batteries, so it's like Electron, but in java, windows can make it faster by just pushing the GUI into the system as it always did.

The secret was .NET Native and C++/CX.

Contrary to Windows Phones, Android was still mostly JIT compiling, with Dalvik.

Windows Phone 8, used technology from Singularity, .NET Native apps were compiled on the cloud and what was downloaded was MDIL (Machine Dependent IL), on device only linking was performed.

Starting with Windows 10, everything was done on cloud and you got a binary targeted to device.

Android had to go through AOT compiler in version 5, 6, reintroduction of JIT with AOT on idle on 7, staring of PGO data across devices on 8, until it got into a similar kind of performance.

And to this day, NDK sucks compared with Windows Phone 8 C++/CX experience.

Windows 8 Inbox apps a lot of them where WinJS actually. But on Windows 8 even web tech was fine (speed-wise).

And WP 8.0 < didn't offer AOT for .NET apps. AoT only came as experimental on WP 8.1 with WinRT apps if I recall right. And on W10 and W10 Mobile, it comes as default for all UWP .NET apps.

I failed to mention WinJS, because hardly anyone used it, hence why it was dropped on UWP, with the WinRT API surface reboot on Windows 10.

Windows 8 had definitely MDIL support, with the Bartok linker from Singularity.

Thankfully the information hasn't yet fully disappeared from Internet.

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/11199234/compiling-windo...

https://www.zdnet.com/article/microsoft-details-its-strategy...

.NET Native was experimental in WP 8.1 and W8. On 10, it becomes mandatory and you couldn't even publish a JIT .NET app to Store.

WP 8.0 didn't even had WinRT, only Silverlight apps, and all JIT. If you wanted native in 8.0, had to go with C++.

About Desktop, C++ was rarely used. Most apps were either .NET C# (JIT) or WinJS. JIT WinRT .NET was super slow, WinJS apps were even faster, which is why many apps were all WinJS, including inbox Windows apps, like the MSN apps.

I AM NOT TALKING ABOUT .NET NATIVE!

Some people really have very selective reading capabilities.

"When you build your app in Visual Studio, the code is not compiled into a native image, but into a machine-independent Common Intermediate Language (CIL) binary file. (CIL was formerly known as Microsoft Intermediate Language, or MSIL.) This CIL file is what you submit to the Store when you’re ready to sell your app. At that time, the binary file is converted from CIL to optimized Machine Dependent Intermediate Language, or MDIL. Finally, when the user downloads your app to a device, the MDIL file is linked to produce a native image. These steps are repeated in your development environment whenever you deploy your app to a Windows Phone 8 device.

Pity that the Channel 9 videos on MDIL for Windows Phone 8 are no longer around.

>WinUI 3 is currently measurably slower than both WPF and UWP. WPF is 20+ years old and even it is not native!!!.

It is similar everywhere, they put out figures, like Teams rewritten from Electron to using native browser or something. claims to have 50% speed up. But 50% of what?

We used to have bundler on web and many vocals devs were suggesting 10 min was fast enough. Atom was fast enough, Electron was fast enough. Node.js was fast enough. It wasn't until things like Zed, ( or some other editor before that ), Bun and other Bundler showing them they were 10 - 50x slower before people realise.

It is quite easy to know why.

WinRT is the Windows team final response to Longhorn, but lets do it with COM and C++, which started in Vista.

This is why all major new APIs since Vista are COM based.

So you get an UI framework with reference counting all over the place, and application identity, which is a kind of sandboxing, for the capabilities like in mobile OSes or macOS.

On the UWP subsystem, you get .NET Native and C++/CX, whose runtimes are WinRT aware and can elide those RC calls.

Whereas using WinRT on Win32, means regular .NET and C++, via interop frameworks CsWinRT and C++/WinRT, plain libraries.

So there is no elision, it is AddRef/Release all over the place.

I don't believe it.

Reference counting is a virtual function call + an integer operation. It doesn't happen that often either because objects in UI frameworks are very long lived. C++'s shared_ptr, Rust's Rc, and Swift, don't typically cause performance problems either.

Of course they cause problems as well, you not believing it doesn't change profiler facts.

I can also easily point you on CppCon, C++Now and WWDC talks, where presenters spend valuable time of their lifes speaking about matters you don't believe.

Can I see the profiler data that shows AddRef/Release being a performance bottleneck?

Yes, learn to use one and point it to a C++ Github project full of shared pointers.

I don’t believe it’s Limiting factor in UI frameworks. I’ve profiled a lot of c++ and a lot of UI code. UI problems tend to come from too much churn and object creation, or doing too much work in the UI thread so it gets laggy, not just doing some reference counting.

embarrassing

While I agree that shared pointer are problematic (I almost never use them in C++), I don't think they're ever really the reason for performance issues in GUI apps. I've been doing GUI programming for more than a decade now and the overwhelming majority GUI performance issues come down to issues like poor use of concurrency (blocking GUI thread), unoptimised algorithms (e.g. for layouts), overdrawing, GPU/CPU sync issues or inefficient input handling.

I have never encountered a performance issue that was to due to reference counting (in fact I'm a big user of the CoW idiom when it comes to UI).

Which of those GUIs have you used where everything was a COM element?

For that matter, AppKit was first released on a NeXT with a 25 MHz 68030 and 8MB of RAM.

Yes, and it doesn't do COM style reference counting to the level like WinUI does, so the point being?

My graduation thesis was porting NeXT software to Windows 95, no need for heads up.

I'm not disagreeing, but I will point out that COM reference counting is an atomic integer operation. That's expensive. boost::local_shared_ptr exists because std::shared_ptr does sometimes cause performance problems. std::shared_ptr must be used sparingly. It's unlikely to matter in a UI scenario with long-lived objects because it, indeed, does use reference counting sparingly.

> WinRT is the Windows team final response to Longhorn, but lets do it with COM and C++, which started in Vista.

Not sure what you mean, I was using COM and C++ for Windows development in the late 90s.

> So there is no elision, it is AddRef/Release all over the place.

...and constructing an object is an insanely complex (and expensive) operation.

Of course you were it predates all the way back to OLE in Windows 3.x, but not the extent it is pervasive in modern Windows past Vista.

After Longhorn's failure, Windows team vouched to replicate all the .NET based ideas for Longhorn, as COM in Vista, followed by the Hilo code sample in Windows 7, how modern Windows applications should look like.

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/previous-versions/msdn10/f...

Best quote from Hilo, to show how Windows team sees .NET,

> So overall C++ is a good choice for writing Windows 7-based applications. It has the correct balance of the raw power and flexibility of C, and the sophisticated language features of C#. C++ as a compiled language produces executable code that is as close to the Windows API as is possible and, indeed, the C++ compiler optimizer will make the code as efficient as possible. The C++ compiler has many of options to allow the developer to choose the best optimization, and Microsoft’s C++ compiler is one the best ways to produce small, fast code. WinRT was the next step, coming back to the ideas that predated .NET as the COM evolution, before Microsoft got distracted with J++ and the project pivoted.

https://arstechnica.com/features/2012/10/windows-8-and-winrt...

https://web.archive.org/web/20190111203733/https://blogs.msd...

Eh... not exactly.

MinWin was the response to Longhorn. When most of the major goals of Longhorn failed to ship and those that did resulted in Vista, Microsoft did a reset. The MinWin project was a massive cleanup effort that promoted cleaner API boundaries and layer separation that defined a minimal bootable NT core at the bottom with reduced overall dependencies.

WinRT was introduced as an alternative API/runtime layer alongside Win32. Both WinRT and Win32 used COM concepts and ran ontop of the NT executive. WinRT was a modern async first object oriented natively sandboxed capability-based runtime that supported built-in projections over manual COM.

Microsoft tried to encourage everyone to adopt WinRT and the new sandboxed App Model on Windows 8, Windows RT, and Windows Phone. It used modern concepts and was more secure than the uncontrolled legacy surface area that Win32 exposed. They shipped those devices with Metro, a new "desktop" interface and didn't allow Win32 Apps. Unfortunately they shot themselves in the foot by shipping full Win32 based Office on Windows RT. This demonstrated that yes Win32 could run on ARM. After that, things fell apart and Microsoft decoupled many WinRT features from the WinRT/UWP model.

WinUI is an interesting UI framework that sits on top of this stack and is decoupled from it. This allows it to be updated independent of the operating system.

MinWin was a kernel refactoring mostly, still during Windows 7 days.

Missed the parts about the multiple reboots of the WinRT API surface between 8, 8.1 and 10.

The deprecation of .NET Native and C++/CX, replaced by tooling without feature parity to this day.

The set of Win32 APIs not available in UWP, even after the 8 and 8.1 (UAP) reboots.

WinUI 2.0 features not yet available on WinUI 3.0.

The pivot from Project Reunion, that six years later hasn't yet delivered on the goals from the BUILD 2020 announcement.

Microsoft is its worst enemy when it turns the hardest advocates in tale tellers from past wars.

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