WinUI 3 Performance: A Leap Forward

Post by sitzkrieg » Fri, May 15, 2026, 5:29 AM UTC

boromi wrote: post #69

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)

Explorer.exe is far slower. It was one of the reasons I switched to macos after being a hardcore microsoft fan for many years. explorer would be so slow with fodlers that has a large number of files it would darastically impede my workflow. Macos is far superior IMO than windows when it comes to daily use efficiency.

Post by pjmlp » Fri, May 15, 2026, 6:19 AM UTC

kristianp wrote: post #58

> 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 do…

Post by antiloper » Fri, May 15, 2026, 7:46 AM UTC

pjmlp wrote: post #73

kristianp wrote: post #58

> 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 do…

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…

Post by taffydavid » Fri, May 15, 2026, 7:59 AM UTC

boromi wrote: post #69

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)

Explorer.exe is far slower. It was one of the reasons I switched to macos after being a hardcore microsoft fan for many years. explorer would be so slow with fodlers that has a large number of files it would darastically impede my workflow. Macos is far superior IMO than windows when it comes to daily use efficiency.

Post by pjmlp » Fri, May 15, 2026, 8:04 AM UTC

antiloper wrote: post #75

pjmlp wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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.