Comment by taeric

As noted by another thread, the Notepad example is surprisingly telling.

My initial gut was to blame the modern drawing primitives. I know that a lot of the old occlusion based ideas were somewhat cumbersome on the application, but they also made a lot of sense to scope down all of the work that an app had to do?

That said, seeing Notepad makes me think it is not the modern drawing primitives, but the modern application frameworks? Would be nice to see a trace of what all is happening in the first few seconds of starting these applications. My current imagination is that it is something akin to a full classpath scan of the system to find plugins that the application framework supported, but that all too many applications don't even use.

That is, used to, writing an application started with a "main" and you did everything to setup the window and what you wanted to show. Nowadays, you are as likely to have your main be offloaded to some logic that your framework provided, with you providing a ton of callbacks/entrypoints for the framework to come back to.