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The new Terminal actually does _crazy_ well. The vintage console on windows, conhost.exe, uses GDI to draw to the window. Unfortunately, GDI is CPU-bound, so dr
by zadjii 7y ago
The new Terminal actually does _crazy_ well. The vintage console on windows, conhost.exe, uses GDI to draw to the window. Unfortunately, GDI is CPU-bound, so drawing the screen actually slows down our processing of the text.
With the Windows Terminal, we've switched to a DX/DWrite based renderer, which no longer uses the CPU to draw text, and moves it to the GPU. Our preliminary testing has a insane perf improvement for applications writing lots of text, something like 10x faster :)
- segfaultbuserr 7y agoExcellent, well done! Developers never need to worry about running cat for a big file or using print() for lots of text again.
- bloopernova 7y agoIs there a place to download the new Terminal to try it out? (Thank you for responding to so many comments on this thread!)
- zadjii 7y agoNot quite yet - when the first preview builds are available, they'll be in the Microsoft Store. Also stay tuned for Rajesh Jha's keynote later today, with our official announcement. It'll have some other relevant information I don't think any of the articles have mentioned quite yet :P
- Schlaefer 7y agoCan you link the session, please?
- zadjii 7y agoI believe this https://mybuild.techcommunity.microsoft.com/home#top-anchor https://mybuild.techcommunity.microsoft.com/home#top-anchor is the link, but I honestly don't know. It's live now, and I think Windows is up soon, though I don't know where in the keynote we are.
- iruoy 7y agoThis is the main reason Alacritty can claim they're the fastest terminal around. They're using OpenGL to render text with the GPU. It does use more RAM because of that, but in these times I'm not really concerned by that fact.
- chupasaurus 7y agoKonsole (KDE's emulator) doesn't use GPU at all and isn't any slower than Alacritty.
- fanf2 7y agoPuTTY (and pterm) renders the terminal a fixed number of times per second, so the graphics does not limit the speed that it can handle output.
- temac 7y agoCan you try to completely omit some rendering if the buffer gets too large? I think this is a very common optim in the X terminal space. I'm asking because 10x sounds great, but in my memories the Windows terminal was so slow to ouput text that this might not be enough, compared to the competition.
- londons_explore 7y agoWasn't there a post here on HN a month or two ago about how conhost is the only windows program with crazy low latency (tens of milliseconds from a key press to that ending up on the screen), and it was all done by not using winforms/.net/html5 like all other apps. Presumably, the new terminal will have the same lag now other windows apps have?