Hacker News Reader

Probably a cache thing. Win11 precaches a lot of stuff if you hover over it or have excess RAM. It's not as smart as SuperFetch and ReadyBoost (with an HDD) was but it's still doing similar things.

View on HN

How big is the calculator app on Windows 11 that you need to cache it in RAM? On macOS, the calculator app is 6 MB. And that's containing both x64 and ARM code. How long does it take a modern SSD (6 GB/s?) to read that?

If it's the same as on Win10 it's a UWP App that needs a ton of dependencies like .net, WinUI2/XAML.

The appx is: Approximate size 21.8 MB according to https://apps.microsoft.com/detail/9wzdncrfhvn5

Win7 calc.exe had 758KB for i686 and 897KB for amd64.

Reminds me of the early days of MacOS X when the Calculator app was written in Java as a demo of how fantastic and native their Java integration with Cocoa bindings was. This of course made it horribly slow to launch since initializing the JVM back then was a massive chore.

You shouldn't need to cache a calculator app to make it load quickly - it opened instantly on a machine running Windows 3.0 with 2MB RAM.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com