Microsoft hasn't had a coherent GUI strategy since Petzold • Hacker News Board

Re: Microsoft hasn't had a coherent GUI strategy since Petzold

#431

Post by layer8 » Mon, Apr 06, 2026, 2:16 PM UTC

ShroudedNight wrote: post #385

layer8 wrote: post #364

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The term GPU was first coined by Sony for the PlayStation with its 3D capabilities, and has been associated with 3D rendering since. In some products it stood for Geometry Processing Unit, again referring to 3D. Purely 2D graphics coprocessors generally don’t fall under what is considered a GPU.

It has been associated with 3D rendering, but given that things like the S3 86C911 are listed on the Wikipedia GPU page, saying "Accelerated GUIs don't need GPU" feels like attempting to win an argument by insisting on a term definition that is significantly divergent from standard vulgar usage [1], which doesn't provide any insight to the problem originally being discussed. [1] Maybe I've just been blindly ignorant…

I don’t agree with what you state as the vulgar usage. “Graphics card” was the standard term a long time, even after they generally carried a (3D) GPU. Maybe up to around 2010 or so? There was no time when you had 2D-only graphics cards being called GPUs, and you didn’t consciously buy a discrete GPU if you weren’t interested in (3D) games or similar applications.

In the context of the discussion, the point is that you don’t need high-powered graphics hardware to achieve a fast GUI for most types of applications that WPF would be used for. WPF being slow was due to architectural or implementation choices.

Re: Microsoft hasn't had a coherent GUI strategy since Petzold

#432

Post by PaulHoule » Mon, Apr 06, 2026, 2:18 PM UTC

judah wrote: post #63

PaulHoule wrote: post #2

The churn would have been much worse if Microsoft was rolling out successful GUI framework after GUI framework. As it is you can still write a Win32 app if that pleases you, or still write .NET (and damn that runtime download!) Microsoft has bought into ‘make a web app’ since 1988, they introduced AJAX, they got flexbox and grid into CSS and numerous HTML 5 features to support application UIs. They ‘frikin bought npm…

Your post is touching on a key question: why write a Windows-specific app? I'm a developer who has built and published several apps. I want the biggest possible audience for those apps. Why would I limit those apps to Windows? (Or even to any single platform/OS?) Web apps work everywhere. The web has grown increasingly powerful and capable. Why would I invest in a technology that can only run on a single OS? Doesn't…

Seems to me the point of the web is: no app store bullshit.

On the web if I want to publish a web app... I publish the app. If Apple things my app isn't good for their business... tough luck for them.

If I want to update a web app... I update the app.

If a user wants to use an app... They visit a URL and the app is there! No having to face id, go looking for the app in an interface that's designed to hide the search function, that is filled with spammy trash imitation apps (that somehow get approved by the app store anyway)

All the time I hear somebody crying that their developer account got canceled and I want to say "what did you expect? the contract for a developer account is a suicide pact for your business." Stay free!

Re: Microsoft hasn't had a coherent GUI strategy since Petzold

#433

Post by steve1977 » Mon, Apr 06, 2026, 2:19 PM UTC

pjmlp wrote: post #299

paavope wrote: post #289

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nobody in this thread is claiming Apple is perfect, just ahead of MS in UI consistency and _less_ buggy

"Ahead" with yes but attitude.

None of the UI frameworks is perfect. Neither the ones from Microsoft, nor the ones from Apple, nor Qt, nor GTK (lol...), nor the web-based ones.

I'm just saying that in my personal opinion and experience, the ones from Apple have the best yay-to-wtf ratio. Your mileage may vary.

Re: Microsoft hasn't had a coherent GUI strategy since Petzold

#434

Post by emddudley » Mon, Apr 06, 2026, 2:28 PM UTC

AdvancedCarrot wrote: post #254

wg0 wrote: post #249

Java wanted to run your code everywhere so they basically wrote a byte code compiler and then wrote one vm per OS/architecture I never understood.NET's purpose. What problem it exactly went out to solve? Did Microsoft want developers to be able to run their applications everywhere too? Absolutely not. Sidenote - MFC is the ugliest thing you'll see. Yet they didn't mention another piece of work called ATL. Active Temp…

I think the answer is simple - they wanted to Sherlock Java.

For others like me that didn't know the term Sherlock:

It means "To obsolete a unique feature in third-party software by introducing a similar or identical feature to the OS or a first-party program/app." The term stems from Apple's 2002 release of Sherlock 3, which made a popular third-party app named "Watson" irrelevant.

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Sherlock#Verb

Re: Microsoft hasn't had a coherent GUI strategy since Petzold

#435

Post by duped » Mon, Apr 06, 2026, 2:28 PM UTC

iamcalledrob wrote: post #309

Desktop, especially Windows, is such a mess. It's 2026. We're running 8+ cores and 32gb ram as standard. We can run super realistic video games at high frame-rates. Yet on the same machine, resizing a window with rectangles in it is laggy on every platform except macOS (where there's a chance it's not laggy).

imo the resizing test is not useful because it's a useful test of a common operation that needs to be optimized, but because it flexes on every major subsystem of the GUI framework.

Another example is startup time. Time to first frame on screen should be less than 20ms. That doesn't mean time until first content is rendered, but time until _all_ content is rendered (loading dialogs, placeholders, etc are better than nothing but entirely miss the point of being fast).

The second example is why even though I understand why developers pick tauri/electron/webviews/etc I can't get over how fucking slow the startup time is for my own work. None of them could show a blank window in under a second the last time I tried.

Re: Microsoft hasn't had a coherent GUI strategy since Petzold

#436

Post by hnthrowaway0315 » Mon, Apr 06, 2026, 2:30 PM UTC

sirjaz wrote: post #399

The biggest issue in my opinion is that Microsoft is chasing web devs. XAML is pita, just like css and html markup. They need to pick a lane and just use it. Allow other frameworks access to the default low level api such as Win32, but document it to the same level as Google does on Android and Apple with SwiftUI

I think the whole world sails on that ship and MSFT just wants to catch up. Their most darling developer tools since 10 years ago are mostly by web and for web: Typescript, VSCode.

Re: Microsoft hasn't had a coherent GUI strategy since Petzold

#437

Post by hnthrowaway0315 » Mon, Apr 06, 2026, 2:31 PM UTC

wg0 wrote: post #249

Java wanted to run your code everywhere so they basically wrote a byte code compiler and then wrote one vm per OS/architecture I never understood.NET's purpose. What problem it exactly went out to solve? Did Microsoft want developers to be able to run their applications everywhere too? Absolutely not. Sidenote - MFC is the ugliest thing you'll see. Yet they didn't mention another piece of work called ATL. Active Temp…

Is MFC that bad? I'm inclined to learn it now and see it with my eyes. I dabbed into Win32 programming for a bit (really just a bit, like a few days) and it was tedious, but not really anything bad.

Re: Microsoft hasn't had a coherent GUI strategy since Petzold

#438

Post by duped » Mon, Apr 06, 2026, 2:31 PM UTC

rigonkulous wrote: post #330

My coherent GUI strategy: just use JUCE. Invested in it, shipped it, seen it solve the cross-platform problem beautifully. Can just write C++, and see it running everywhere. The JUCE GUI capabilities are more than adequate for many, many things. There are other platform-scaffolded cross-platform frameworks. JUCE is cromulantly FNORD.

JUCE has too many downsides to seriously recommend imo. "Just write C++" is also doing heavy lifting, since JUCE is its own bespoke flavor of C++.

Re: Microsoft hasn't had a coherent GUI strategy since Petzold

#439

Post by chris_wot » Mon, Apr 06, 2026, 2:31 PM UTC

mwcampbell wrote: post #327

aleph_minus_one wrote: post #320

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Bear in mind, this is software that basically just displays text Displaying text is surprisingly hard, as one can easily find out if ones dives into the big rabbit hole of font rendering.

Yes, text shaping and layout are complex. My point is that the program wasn't doing anything that should have required a GPU, particularly for the resolutions that were common back then.

I’m knee deep in refactoring LibreOffice code around text rendering. I can assure you, it’s complex but it doesn’t require a GPU!

Re: Microsoft hasn't had a coherent GUI strategy since Petzold

#440

Post by u8080 » Mon, Apr 06, 2026, 2:35 PM UTC

vscode-rest wrote: post #191

bigstrat2003 wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Web apps work everywhere. The web has grown increasingly powerful and capable. Why would I invest in a technology that can only run on a single OS? There are other options besides "web app" and "only one OS". A cross platform app which uses something like GTK or QT will be a massively better experience for your users, one a web app cannot hope to equal.

What’s an example of a well made GTK or QT app in your opinion? And what would be the steel man Web app to compare that to?

Telegram Desktop (Qt)