[mwcampbell]

> 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.

[fsloth]

"WPF had made a bet on then-advanced graphics hardware for reasonable performance, and that was bad for these users. "

OTOH WPF is today surprisingly strong GUI platform if you just want to get your Windows GUI out there.

It runs really nicely even on low end hardware. All the nice styling and blending techniques now _just work_ even on the most cheap low end laptop.

The fact it's over decade old means all the LLM:s actually know really well how to use it.

So you can just guide your LLM to follow Microsoft best practices on logic development and styling and "just add this button here, this button here, add this styling here" etc.

It's the least annoying GUI development experience I've ever had (as a dev, non-designer).

Of course not portable out of the box (avalonia is then the ticket there).

If you want 3D, you can just plug in OpenTK with OpenGL 3.3. Decades old _but good enough for almost everything_ if you are not writing a high perf game.

Really, WPF plus OpenTK is a really robust and non-surprising development platform that runs from old laptops (eg. T14 Gen 2 per my testing) onwards.

I've been doing a sideproject using WPF and OpenTK - .net works really great - here is a sample video of the whole stack (from adashape.com)

https://youtu.be/FM_iuB3-0aA?si=j7kS68ZVenmPwvAO&t=34

[fleventynine]

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...

[n8cpdx]

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.

[pipeline_peak]

What have you heard about SwiftUI being bloated?

[n8cpdx]

My lived experience. Maybe bloated isn’t the right word, but attention to performance just isn’t there. Try using any swift UI app on iPhone or Mac. Try resizing a swift UI app window on Mac.

[jshier]

Yeah, it's not bloated, there are just a lot of surprising and weird performance holes, especially on macOS. Even on iOS there's dumb things like, if your List cell's outer view isn't a specific type, List won't optimize for cell reuse, and it will start dequeuing cells for every item in the List eagerly. Wrap your actual cell type with a VStack or something and it will work properly, only dequeuing visible cells. It can be really nice to work with, but man, some of the implicit behavior, performance other otherwise, is shocking.

[aaronsung]

I do not think the current computers can catch up with Electron. When it is just one or two simple app it is ok, but when everything is built with Electron (which is happening now) then it is not enough even with 32gb+ ram.

[rincebrain]

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...

[mwcampbell]

Your argument presupposes that we should accept escalating baseline hardware requirements as good or even necessary, for a desktop computing world that was, from the user's perspective, doing pretty much the same thing as before. I reject that.

[rincebrain]

My recollection of current events at the time was that you were already having a dogshit experience using computers for many common things in the XP era with underpowered video hardware and trying anything complex in a browser, or Flash things with a lot of assets, so it's less forcing escalating a baseline and more recognizing the realities of what people were already expecting in a "good" computer and building thing that could take advantage of that.

I would agree it should have degraded much more gracefully and more readily than it did, but I'm quite confident we hadn't hit the point of minimal returns on improvements in hardware that would be necessary for such an argument yet.

Hell, I probably wouldn't make that argument until large amounts of RAM and VRAM (or unified RAM) are ubiquitous, because so many workloads degrade so badly with too little of either.

[bombcar]

Apple had been doing GPU-accelerated GUIs since the early NeXT days; it was certainly possible on hardware weaker than what Vista required.

[runjake]

Minor correction: Apple introduced GPU-accelerated GUI in 10.2 with the introduction of Quartz Extreme.

Display PostScript did not have GPU acceleration, as far as I know.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quartz_Compositor?#Quartz_Extr...

[Zardoz84]

Windows 3.1, with the aproppiated drivers and modern SVGA card, had accelerated 2d graphics. Accelerated GUIs don't even need GPU or 3d.

[ShroudedNight]

What does "GPU" mean here? Previous uses of the term seemed to imply "dedicated hardware for improving rendering performance" which the SVGA stuff would seem to fall squarely under.

[layer8]

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.

[ShroudedNight]

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 for 30 years, but as far as I could tell, 'GPU' seemed to emerge as a more Huffman-efficient encoding for the same thing we were calling a 'video card'

[daemin]

We used to call those things a "Video Card", which you put into your computer to get a video signal out.

Back in the day there was a card called an S3 Virge, which we affectionally called a 3D decelerator card, because of its lacklustre 3D performance.

[bombcar]

Most people consider GPU to mean "3D accelerator" though technically it refers to any coprocessor that can do work "for" the main system at the same time.

GPU-accelerated GUI usually refers to using the texture mapping capabilities of a 3D accelerator for "2D" GUI work.

[cyberax]

Calling that "the GPU acceleration" on Mac OS X was a bit overstating the things. It supported rotations, compositing, and some other bulk operations, but text and precise 2D graphics was rendered on the CPU.

It _still_ is not trivial to render high-quality 2D graphics on the GPU.

[kalleboo]

I mean Apple had a GPU-accelerated GUI in 1990, but probably not what we think of "GPU accelerated" these days

https://wiki.preterhuman.net/Apple_Macintosh_Display_Card_8-...

[seltzered_]

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...

[VorpalWay]

Blurry fonts was my main issue with WPF. I get headaches from blurry text and the colour bleeding from ClearType just makes the headache worse.

Fortunately for me, I had mostly switched to Linux by that time already, where it was at the time relatively easy to just enable grey scale AA with full hinting.

In recent years this has gotten worse again with modern software incorrectly assuming everyone has a High DPI monitor. My trick has been to use bitmap fonts with no AA, but that broke in recent versions of electron, where bitmap fonts are now rendered blurry. So I had to stay on an old version of vscode from last year, and I will be looking to switch to another editor (high time anyway for other reasons).

[xmcqdpt2]

emacs + bitmap font for me and I'm continually shocked when I have to use something else by how it is blurry and laggy.

[ack_complete]

WPF originally had two major rendering issues. One was the lack of pixel snapping support, and another was gamma correction issues during text rendering, particularly for light text on a dark background (due to an alpha correction approximation, IIRC). The two combined led to blurry text in WPF applications.

These were finally improved for WPF 4, since Visual Studio 2010 switched to it and had a near riot in the betas due to the poor rendering in the text editor.

[aleph_minus_one]

> 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.

[mwcampbell]

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.

[bgrainger]

The promise was that WPF would use hardware-accelerated libraries such as DirectWrite to put text on the screen even faster than GDI+ (using the CPU) could do. The reality turned out to be quite different: multiple layers of abstraction and just plain inefficient WPF code [1] meant that users needed powerful CPUs and GPUs just to get reasonable performance.

[1] https://faithlife.codes/blog/2019/06/improving-wpf-text-disp...

[chris_wot]

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!

[nottorp]

Hmm doesn't that sound like Apple's Tahoe/iOS 26? Effects upon effects upon more effects.

[steve1977]

iOS 26 runs surprisingly smooth on my iPhone 12 Pro Max though.

[nottorp]

Runs like crap on my daughter's 12 mini.

Actually what does "surprisingly smooth" mean? Better than you expected? Or actually smooth?

[steve1977]

I had an Xperia for a while but kept my iPhone and then installed the iOS 26 beta on it. Expectation was that it would run but be pretty painful. Surprisingly, even the beta ran so fine that I sold the Xperia and switched back to iOS. And it's still my daily driver.

[cyberax]

Not really. Ironically, WPF designers wanted to make things better by offloading the rendering onto the GPU. They also added DirectWrite that was supposed to provide high-quality text rendering with all the bells and whistles like layout for languages with complex scripts, in hopes of eventually offloading the text rendering as well.

But they just plain failed to execute well on this idea.

[wiseowise]

2008 edition of “let’s rewrite it in react”.

[sylens]

2008 had its own version of React and it was called Adobe Air

[beAbU]

Adobe Air was just Flash wearing an ill fitting business suit.

[ecshafer]

The fact that software to show the bible needs a GPU is funny in some kind of dystopian way. That is the kind of software that should work in 50k of memory.