> A freaking notepad app takes almost 50mb in memory when equivalent NOTEPAD done in pure Win32 C takes 1.8mb of memory.
1.8MB? I don't know how much it took on our 386 computer with 4MB RAM and windows 3.11, but hopefully not that much
1.8MB? I don't know how much it took on our 386 computer with 4MB RAM and windows 3.11, but hopefully not that much
Possibly space for data allocated by one of the 50+ DLLs it loads directly or indirectly to support features like Unicode text input and rendering.
Actually, it gets much worse. By default, recent Windows 11 versions use a completely new version of Notepad with support for things like tabs, styled text, and AI (!).
Even with all the new features disabled, this one has a 32 MB private working set before opening a single file.
Amusingly, GNU Emacs, a.k.a. Eight Megabytes And Constantly Swapping at a time when entry-level UNIX workstations actually shipped with as little as 4 MB RAM, opens on the same machine with a smaller (25 MB) private working set than the new Notepad.
To be fair to at least one team at Microsoft, the EDIT.EXE text-mode editor recently added to Windows 11, with a user interface that somehow manages to be more consistent with basic Windows UI conventions than many modern Windows GUI apps despite not being a GUI app at all, opens with a private working set size of only 520 kB.
Once you create a window, even if you haven't drawn that window, your minimum is now around 500KB.