Comment by jodrellblank
5 days ago
I sighed when I read your comment, a comment which is exemplary of what Casey Muratori was ranting against - casual lazy dismissal of the idea that software can be faster, based on misunderstanding and lack of knowledge and/or interest, and throwing out the first objection that comes to mind as if it's an impassable obstacle. There were no bazillion features that made WinTerm slow over the years because Windows Terminal was a new product for Windows 10, released in 2019.[1]. There were piles of problems in Windows Terminal, Casey calls out that it didn't render Right-to-Left Arabic combining glyphs and it wasn't a perfect highly polished program from the outset. And it was an optional download, Fortune 500s wouldn't run it if they didn't want to.
RefTerm was explicitly not a production quality terminal and was not intended to be a replacement for Windows Terminal. RefTerm was a lower bound for performance of an untuned single-thread terminal. RefTerm was a proof of concept that if Microsoft had spent money and engineering skill on performance they could have profiled and used fancy algorithms and shortcuts and reimplemented slow Windows APIs with faster local ones, used threading, and improved on RefTerm's performance. A proof that "significantly faster terminals are unrealistic" is not true, that all the casual dismissals of why it's impossible are not the reasons for slowness, and that 10x better is an easily achievable floor, not a distant unreachable ceiling.
As a result of Casey's public shaming, Windows Terminal developers did improve performance.
Oh, sorry if that's the tone that got out of my message. I'm a big Casey fan myself, so I'm absolutely convinced that there is something "better" to do in terms of performance.
However, just because Windows Terminal was "new" in 2019, it does not mean that it was not embarking lots of legacy code to ensure compatibility with older software.
For example, the wikipedia page you linked to explicitly says WinTerm is "a replacement for Windows Console", which dates back to Win 9x [1] ; and that it's "compatible with Windows Narrator" [2], which dates from the early 2000s, and which scares me just by its name...
So, yes, there is probably a story of piling crap on top of backward compatible crap with zero incentive for performance, and an unhealthy dose a learned-helplessness.
I don't necessarily says it's an excuse for the problem ; but I would really not be surprised if it was "part" of the problem that MS is facing, and that Casey attacked a slightly different problem by not caring about obscure retro-compatibility to Win3.1.
It's good that the team used the software to improve their own. They're in a better position to argue than armchair commentators like me.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Console#Windows_9x
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Narrator_(Windows)