Native C++ Development is Still Being Used
I just stumbled upon an article mentioning that Evernote abandoned WPF and the Microsoft .NET framework and rewrote their application from scratch in native C++ code 🙂 The official reason given:
The blurry fonts, slow startup times, large memory footprint, and poor support for certain graphics cards were all issues that the technology behind 3.5 was incapable of resolving. As a result, we ended up chasing down platform bugs rather than adding the great features our users wanted.
Jody said,
Wrote on November 4, 2010 @ 1:36 pm
Funny that one of their complaint about WPF was blurry fonts. They must be doing something wrong. WPF uses DirectWrite on Windows7 and DirectWrite has truly excellent font rendering. Have a look at the difference between IE9 fonts and FF4 on Windows7 sometime, especially with custom fonts. The difference is incredible.
Maybe they are all still using XP…
Marc Gregoire said,
Wrote on November 4, 2010 @ 1:48 pm
I’m not into WPF myself. Where is it mentioned that WPF uses DirectWrite?
jschroedl said,
Wrote on November 10, 2010 @ 3:49 pm
I agree, it’s good to see C++ still getting some love.
Evernote went native after attempting to use WPF 3.5 which was BEFORE the LayoutRounding and other font rendering fixes in WPF 4 so their decision does make sense based on that timeline.
We have a WPF application using C++/CLI which is reasonable though VS2010 really dropped the ball when it did not include Intellisense. Visual Assist helps a little but is also unreliable often.