> We will wonder why with all the millions of lines of C/C++ reference code available to be perused and then rewritten in Rust, Pascal, C#, Zig or Nim, and the vociferousness of their advocates, why that didn't happen in a reasonable timeframe.
Easy, every single time .NET team does some advances into that direction, it gets sabotaged by WinDev and their C++ love.
XNA vs DirectXTK, .NET vs COM/WinRT,...
Windows could have turned into something like Android, with managed userspace and a very constrained native layer for restricted use cases, naturally WinDev cannot let that ever happen.
That was simply because the alternatives to Win32 had various serious regressions, be it usability, features, bloat, or other things that are important in one way or other to the people who stick with Win32.
More secure languages and APIs can only win if they are both easier to use and offer the same features.
As proven by mobile OSes, it is not technical features that win the game, rather railing the developers into the future, regardless of their opinion.
The problem at Microsoft is that what Office and WinDev want, drives the whole business no matter what, those "serious regressions, be it usability, features, bloat, or other things" get fixed, if one cares enough to make it happen.
Speaking which, Office now is an heavy user of JavaScript, less perfomant than .NET, because it needs to be in the cloud.
Whereas Windows, while king of the desktop, is undeniable that it lost the backend to POSIX clones even if we consider MS shops with IIS, where languages like Java and Go dominate.
Also apparently PWAs are cool now as fight against ChromeOS, which from performance point of view are much worse than those former Win32 alternatives.
Before I ditched Windows a couple of years ago, I was able to experience first hand how bloated and slow was the software that Microsoft rewrote in C#, so I kind of understand why such rewrites were being sabotaged.
If by some minor miracle a C# or Java GUI app is not slow, then it will use a ton of memory. A whole OS of such apps would be a nightmare.
The new modern/UWP apps in Windows 10, like the calculator and start menu, are written in C++, aren't they? They manage to be horrendously slow and bloated without C#, so maybe C# isn't the problem.
They are, UWP is basically another take on what was being discussed before .NET as COM evolution, and Longhorn's failure has given them the wind to pursue it as Windows foundation.
So since Vista all major Windows APIs are COM based, not always surfaced to .NET, and we are expected to just go through books like ".NET and COM: The Complete Interoperability Guide" and do the needful ourselves.
WinRT as introduced in Windows 8 was then the full reboot, with .NET metadata taking over TLB files (COM type libraries) and introducing a new base interface IInspectable.
So the long term vision pursued by Synofsky, was that .NET Native and C++/CX would take over with COM fully replacing .NET.
Naturally it all failed down during the borked execution, and now you still have devs pushing for C++/WinRT, the C++/CX replacement, with ATL like tooling as "modern". Maybe it is modern given the tools that they are used at WinDev, I guess.
Ars even has a nice article how this reboot took place,
It's quite simple really. Bad programmers (or good programmers in bad environments) are able to write slow code in any language, and the current Windows Desktop team seems to be an example of that.
You literally mention Java GUI apps in response to a post that calls out Android, a mobile OS and application ecosystem implemented in Java. The languages are not the issue.
Indeed, the big difference is that Google was willing to put money on the table to make it work.
Those improvements are exactly what WinDev sabotaged in regards to Windows.
Also in case you have forgotten, Objective-C and Swift are also managed languages, check chapter 5 of Garbage Collection Handbook, or any other CS reference in automatic memory management algorithms.
As proven by Midori (used to power Asian bing while in development), Android, ChromeOS, iOS/iPad OS, among others, it is possible when everyone works together for a common goal instead of sabotaging others work.
Easy, every single time .NET team does some advances into that direction, it gets sabotaged by WinDev and their C++ love.
XNA vs DirectXTK, .NET vs COM/WinRT,...
Windows could have turned into something like Android, with managed userspace and a very constrained native layer for restricted use cases, naturally WinDev cannot let that ever happen.