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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.