What is amazing to me is just how fast those apps run even on W11. I have an older copy of Adobe Acrobat, and double-clicking a .pdf to full app launch and render is literally an eye blink. Compare to Reader DC, which is about 5 seconds of who knows what.
(FYI: Older versions of the PDF reader might have critical parsing vulnerabilities that affect system security. You're probably fine if you only download trusted PDFs, but it's best to take caution.)
They are fast precisely because you are running them on win11 hardware. Try running them on the old pentiums or Core 2s and they would be just as slow.
Try using any of that 25-year-old software with accessibility devices, or at any DPI scaling other than 96x96, or split between two monitors with different refresh rates (or worse yet, two monitors connected to two different GPUs), or with sound or 3D accel that works over RDP, or with an RTL UI language. Those are some of the many "whats" that you get batteries-included in modern OS UI frameworks in exchange for the added overhead.
The hardware is not a bit faster. It is many order of magnitude faster.
I can play video games at 4k 10bit HDR 120Hz with a 1kHz mouse polling rate. I can copy data at 10Gbps across computers via 30m of copper. I can transfer at 1.3Gbps through wifi.
But it takes 250ms for the f'n calculator to start up on a good day?
Although it's true that maintained UI frameworks have features less-maintained UI frameworks don't, this isn't really the cause of the slowdowns. Those features are all edge cases that aren't in use most of the time, by most users, and so shouldn't be incurring any significant performance hit on the regular paths.
And you can certainly have such features in modern / fast frameworks. Take a Java Swing or JavaFX app and compile it with GraalVM Native Image. The framework dates from the 90s but is maintained because JetBrains relies on it. It supports hi-dpi displays, accessibility apps, multi-monitor rendering and so on. And when natively compiled, it will start in the blink of an eye.
Can you actually compile Swing or JavaFX with GraalVM? I have only ever heard anecdotal evidence of that, even though I have known people from the Graal team itself.
Like, there shouldn’t be anything fundamental that prevents it from working (it just has platform specific native dyn libs which works fine with graal), but never seen an example, so I would appreciate a pointer.
I'm sure you're right in what you say, but this is not the reason modern acrobat is slow. I'm sure you could build a modern and accessible app that starts and loads the requested PDF snappily to show it, but acrobat will also (iirc) have some cloud integration now for storage and a bunch of the features they offer are gated behind some sort of subscription, the status of which I would guess is loaded on startup, probably along with a bunch of other stuff.
> or worse yet, two monitors connected to two different GPUs
This was a great feature of the Macintosh II in 1987. Sad that it's not ubiquitous yet. (Even modern Macs snap apps to one monitor or the other, so no video walls.)
> Even modern Macs snap apps to one monitor or the other, so no video walls
Linux, and I believe Windows as well, can display windows across different monitors just fine. But sometimes the monitors are too different, and part of the window gets ugly. Probably a blocker in Appleverse.
