alt Hacker News> WPF was good
As someone who saw what impact WPF had on average users running average hardware in the late 2000s to early 2010s, I disagree.
In 2011, my brother was in seminary, using an average Windows Vista-era laptop that he had been given in 2008. When he was home for Christmas in 2011, we were talking about his laptop, and he told me that the Logos Bible software ran sluggishly on that laptop. He said something about how, for reasons unknown to him, the current version of Logos required advanced graphics capabilities (I forget exactly how he phrased it, but he had learned that the slowness had something to do with graphics). Bear in mind, this is software that basically just displays text, presumably with some editing for adding notes and such. At the time, I just bought him another laptop.
A few years later, I happened to read that Logos version 4 was built on WPF. Then, remembering my brother, I found this Logos forum thread:
https://community.logos.com/discussion/6200
This shows that Logos users were discussing the performance of Logos on machines with different graphics hardware. For a program that was all about displaying and editing text, it shouldn't have mattered. WPF had made a bet on then-advanced graphics hardware for reasonable performance, and that was bad for these users. And that's just the one example I know about.
Replies
I would argue that was less that WPF was the wrong life choice and more that Microsoft shouldn't have bent the knee to Intel's antitrust push to say their crap hardware was sufficient. [1]
[1] - https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2008/03/the-vista-capable-de...
I had the misfortune of writing a complicated WPF app from scratch circa 2010-2011. Performance using the WPF widgets was terrible compared to HTML/Javascript/Blink; we ended throwing away most of the WPF code other than the main shell and a few dialogs, reimplementing the importantant stuff with immediate-mode Direct3D/Direct2D to get the necessary speed.
I recall wasting a lot of time staring at decompiled .NET bytecode trying to understand how to work around many problems with it, and it was clear from the decompiler output that WPF's architecture was awful...
It goes back pretty far. Nowadays the controversy is electron vs native (where most windows devs would consider WPF/.NET a native option).
But if you read books from the 2000s, there was much discussion about the performance overhead of a VM and garbage collected language; something like WinForms was considered the bloated lazy option.
I’m sure in a few years computers will catch up (IMO they did a while ago actually) and Electron will be normal and some new alternative will be the the bloated option - maybe LLMs generating the UI on the fly à la the abomination Google was showing off recently?
FWIW Apple has made a similar transition recently from the relatively efficient AppKit/UIKit to the bloated dog that is SwiftUI.
A notable example I remember from around 2010 was when Evernote dropped WPF, supposedly due to blurry text issues but probably also performance (remember when we called it EverBloat?)
Can't find the original blog post about it but here's a couple mentions of it:
- https://www.edandersen.com/p/evernote-has-no-patience-drops-...
- https://www.reddit.com/r/csharp/comments/x0nu7h/comment/im9k...