Why modern software is slow
Oh, this is <i>nothing</i>.<p>Windows force-updated my Notepad.exe to the new modern UI version.<p>It is very visibly laggy for basic actions such as opening menus or scrolling through text.<p>You have to be <i>spectacularly</i> bad at programming to make something so basic so slow in 2022 on a <i>very</i> high-end gaming computer.<p>Not just bad, but utterly oblivious. Casey Muratori excoriated the Windows Terminal dev team for failing to achieve a consistent 60 fps when displaying fixed-width text, which is such a trivial exercise that Casey whipped up a demo in like two weekends. [1]<p>Now the Notepad team insisted on following in the Windows Terminal team&#x27;s footprints and slowing down the other fixed-width text app that <i>needs to be lightweight fast</i> for all sorts of reasons. Nobody needs Notepad to be pretty. Everyone needs it to <i>work</i>.[2]<p>Just amazing to see something like this happen. It&#x27;s like a slow motion train wreck, ruining one Windows app at a time.<p>[1] These videos are especially &quot;shocking&quot; because the code he wrote is terse, straightforward, lightning fast, and <i>more correct</i> than whatever madness Microsoft was doing.<p>First weekend: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=hxM8QmyZXtg" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=hxM8QmyZXtg</a><p>Second weekend: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=99dKzubvpKE" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=99dKzubvpKE</a><p>[2] For example, opening a 300 MB log file takes a solid <i>minute</i> of time, which is absurdly slow. It also bloats this to 800 MB of memory usage. For comparison, TextPad opens it in 5 seconds and uses 30 MB of memory. VS Code, an <i>electron</i> application(!) opens in under 2 seconds.