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by hammycheesy 1085 days ago
> a lot of the Windows shell and apps have been slowly rewritten in C#

I worked on the Shell team until late 2022. There is very little C#, if any at all. The vast majority of the Windows Shell is still C++ with a significant amount of WinRT/COM.

2 comments

Yeah, and as a corollary, many apps using C#/WinForms are quite snappy. Microsoft did invest a lot into having .NET apps start fast with the GAC/ngen
Thanks for the confirmation. I’ll fix the text.

What I had in mind when I wrote this sentence though is how the modern apps that people seem to like /are/ C#, such as Windows Terminal and PowerToys, and these feel quite slow to me. But, yeah, calling those the shell is a stretch.

Windows Terminal is 93% c++ on github. Not sure where you got the impression it was mostly c#
Bad memory. The idea that Windows Terminal was C# was in the back of my mind for some reason but I did not verify this fact. Thanks for keeping me honest; updated the text now.

PowerToys is mostly C# though, which I have also verified now.