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>What happened?

Building extremely high quality user interfaces has been de-prioritized by our tech gods. See: ElectronJS. Every "native" "desktop" application built upon such technologies has a minimum latency bound that is user-detectable and a memory appetite that cannot be appeased by even the most opulent workstation-class system.

Those of us seeking client->server->client trips that are measured in microseconds (on top of network stack latency) have been forced into the dark nether-reaches of technology. Writing 2D graphics libraries and client/server UI frameworks from scratch has become one of my new favorite hobbies.

All of this is especially upsetting when you consider how much complexity has been magically hand-waved away over the last 20 years with modern OS, language and tool design. You don't even have to go to C/C++ to get the UI performance these days. A high-quality C# implementation using platform-specific graphics interop is more than capable of producing UIs that can respond in the 10-1000 microsecond range. WinApi interop and hooking the window message pump is a trivial exercise. See: https://github.com/prasannavl/WinApi et. al.



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