WinUI 3 Performance: A Leap Forward

Out of sheer curiosity I gave it a quick "search" how one goes from client code instrumenting WinUI to then pixels appearing on the screen, and it seems like quite the indirection-ridden and generalized journey, which I fundamentally can't imagine being particularly cheap. Maybe it's just my unfamiliarity with this world though, never wrote a graphics application end-to-end (i.e. rasterization included) on my own.

> 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.

Windows can now load 2x Ads 100% quicker!

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)

I'm stilll shocked that we're reinventining the wheel of things that were solved 20+ years ago, like UIs, and somehow making them massively more resource intensive

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

I have BEEN WAITING FOR the calculator (calc.exe) to launch in Windows 11. In my view Microsoft (again) lost its way with 11.

I seriously hope Microsoft consolidates all their Windows app dev on WinUI and invests heavily in making it great.

I also wish that they’d make WinUI work on macOS as well similar to Avalonia, but I think they probably won’t.

As someone who builds desktop apps:

Is there any reason I would use this over something cross-platform like EGUI? I am kind of over software being OS-specific; this is one of the biggest compatibility mistakes we've made. Along with the related process of making drawing pixels on a display a complicated process!

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 baffles me how something that never had so much slowness can be completely FUBAR'd I miss when Windows had standard apps that were very optimal and didn't slow and ruin my experience. I find myself opening that laptop less and less, and one of these days I might just slap Linux over it.

Nice to see. I wonder how feasible it would be to build a plain C interface… would be nice for building bindings to other languages.

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, at least, but OH MY GOD

Also seeing stuff like text fields re-implemented from scratch in XML scares me. I don't like to see that.

"We need a new standard!" :p

The user experience is the way it is because they want it to be. This is at best optimizing one small component which as we all know can be done infinitely well and still have a negligible effect on the use of the system.

How about F# support? Until then, happy to support Avalonia.

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

Not sure how much will this idea fly in today's time. I would love to be proven wrong though.