I'd suspect a lot of this is offloading so much of the graphical setup to not the application. Feels like we effectively turned window management into system calls?
ojs@MacBook-Pro-4 /tmp % time ./a.out
Hello world
./a.out 0.00s user 0.00s system 1% cpu 0.268 total
ojs@MacBook-Pro-4 /tmp % time ./a.out
Hello world
./a.out 0.00s user 0.00s system 72% cpu 0.004 total
The difference you show depends on the internet connection, on slow wifi I've seen this delay go over 0.7s in the past. But again, just the first time, which is a problem for developers who recompile their code frequently but for the end user experience that's not as relevant.
I thought it's common knowledge that starting apps for the first time after reboot or after doing something else is slower and usually it's explained by the app being in cache for the next launch. But here the it can't be cache, because reading anything from SSD can't be that slow and it should already be in cache anyway.
The comparison is using OS X 10.6 - I used to daily drive it and it was pretty snappy on my machine - which is corroborated by this guy's Twitter video capture.
As for Windows performance - Notepad/File Explorer might be slower than strictly necessary, but one of the advantages of Windows' backwards compatibility, is that I keep using the same stuff - Total Commander and Notepad++, that I used from the dawn of time, and those things haven't gotten slow (or haven't changed lol).
Unlikely, yes, but that sort of thing comes up in security reviews.
Anyone who has worked on optimizing complex programs knows that you can do a lot with a computer. > 100 ms latency to open Notepad is just ridiculous.
I'm very happy with my M2 Mac. It's a giant leap forward in performance and battery life. But Electron is a giant leap backward of similar magnitude.
Note: The main reason is that Notion is fantastic but too much for me. I'm not that organized...
If Siri is enabled, the OS waits until you release the space bar to determine if you performed a long or a short press, which causes Spotlight to be delayed.
Another quibble I have with the article is the statement that the visual effects on macOS were smoothly animated from the start. This is not so. Compositing performance on Mac OS X was pretty lousy at first and only got significantly better when Quartz Extreme was released with 10.2 (Jaguar). Even then, Windows was much more responsive than Mac OS X. You could argue that graphics performance on macOS didn't get really good until the release of Metal.
Nowadays, I agree, Windows performance is not great, and macOS is quite snappy, at least on Apple Silicon. I too hope that these performance improvements aren't lost with new bloat.