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WinUI 3 Performance: A Leap Forward

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Re: WinUI 3 Performance: A Leap Forward

#51

Post by LoganDark »

pjmlp wrote: post #49
LoganDark wrote: post #27

The user experience of WinUI 3 isn't the worst I've seen but the developer experience is absolutely awful. I tried to make a simple app with it and the number of hacks I needed to get it to look and feel the way I almost wanted was horrible. And the documentation sucks. I had to read the system level implementations of controls in order to figure most of it out. It's great those implementations are available to read,…

And better not touch C++/WinRT, it makes that experience a few notches up.

WinRT isn't the most awful in the world to use from, say, Rust because there are auto-generated bindings, but I agree that C++ can be awful.

Re: WinUI 3 Performance: A Leap Forward

#52

Post by pjmlp »

solarkraft wrote: post #2

Wow, they are actually starting to care about quality. Color me surprised.

Nah, mostly marketing.

The only people that still buy into this are folks that never developed anything with WinUI, aka WinUI 3.0.

Since Windows 8, they messed up the development experience so bad, that they managed to turn many advocates like myself into vocal critics.

We avoid anything WinRT unless there is no way to do the same with Win32, classical COM (WinRT is an evolution of COM), or regular .NET (Forms/WPF).

And also post regularly about the actual state of the tooling unlike Microsoft's marketing posts.

Example, they keep mentioning about WinUI being supported in C++, but never mention how bad C++/WinRT dev experience has become, or that the framework is in maintenance, and has been superseded by WIL.

Re: WinUI 3 Performance: A Leap Forward

#53

Post by pjmlp »

LoganDark wrote: post #51
pjmlp wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And better not touch C++/WinRT, it makes that experience a few notches up.

WinRT isn't the most awful in the world to use from, say, Rust because there are auto-generated bindings, but I agree that C++ can be awful.

WinRT was great, back when using it via .NET Native and C++/CX.

It was like Delphi and C++ Builder kind of experience, then they killed the whole experience.

Rust with windows-rs is hardly any better, and coming from the same folks that killed C++/CX, with false promises at CppCon 2017, I don't have great hopes for it. They will jump ship again after a new shiny.

Re: WinUI 3 Performance: A Leap Forward

#55

Post by refulgentis »

wiseowise wrote: post #36

Ironic how in supposedly tech company nobody gives a shit about doing great technical work unless it aligns with some VPs goals.

At the end of the day, they find a way to get rid of you if you don’t, even if the VP would endorse your efforts. I understand what you’re saying and hope you understand why it happens, it took me years, and pain.

Re: WinUI 3 Performance: A Leap Forward

#56

Post by smallstepforman »

throwaway613746 wrote: post #34
tiffanyh wrote: post #30

I run macOS every day, and while I find Apple Silicon shockingly fast - I'm surprised at how shockingly slow Finder seems to be. This might be off topic, but wish Apple would focused on Finder performance (app loading, window refresh, etc) like this blog post by Microsoft. And in case you're curious, my disk is only using 250GB in use (50GB for Apps, 150GB for System Data, 50GB for macOS)

macos itself is sluggish af I booted up an OLD imac stuck on 10.something, with an - I can't remember which gen - i5 and only 8gb of ram and I was blown away by how much it FLIES on that ancient hardware - even compared to my M1 Max Mac Studio Apple Silicon is great. Everything else sucks.

Well, they could have had BeOS instead of NeXTStep.

Re: WinUI 3 Performance: A Leap Forward

#57

Post by CrimsonCape »

brokencode wrote: post #5
Almondsetat wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't worry, once enough people come back, they'll roll back in the ads and the intrusive performance-killing features and the cycle will repeat all over again

Microsoft has long had a tick tock cycle for Windows. 98: great. ME: bad. XP: great. Vista: bad. 7: great. 8: bad. 10: great. 11: bad

Maybe Windows 12 will be the promised "last Windows" which 10 was supposed to be.

I'd love to know the exec who ordered Windows 11. It stinks of "I need a product on my resume that I launched because being Windows 10 "maintainer" sounds so pathetic on a resume."

Re: WinUI 3 Performance: A Leap Forward

#58

Post by kristianp »

> 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.

Re: WinUI 3 Performance: A Leap Forward

#59

Post by LoganDark »

pjmlp wrote: post #53
LoganDark wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

WinRT isn't the most awful in the world to use from, say, Rust because there are auto-generated bindings, but I agree that C++ can be awful.

WinRT was great, back when using it via .NET Native and C++/CX. It was like Delphi and C++ Builder kind of experience, then they killed the whole experience. Rust with windows-rs is hardly any better, and coming from the same folks that killed C++/CX, with false promises at CppCon 2017, I don't have great hopes for it. They will jump ship again after a new shiny.

The thing is, at least compiled programming languages are statically typed. XAML is... well I don't think they even have a language server for it. My experience in Visual Studio (non-Code) was pretty bad.

Re: WinUI 3 Performance: A Leap Forward

#60

Post by Bolwin »

giancarlostoro wrote: post #18

Will any of this translate to Windows programs like File Manager? Whatever their Image viewer is even called? For some ungodly reason, on my last remaining Windows Device, which is a Surface Book 2 (a Microsoft made laptop!) with very vanilla configurations, everything slows to a crawl in the file manager and if I try to view images on a directory and do the "right arrow" for next or "left arrow" key for previous. It…

The photos app also uses webview so yes hopefully
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