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Refterm v2 - Resource usage, binary splat, glyph sizing, and more

Molly Rocket · 67.8K views · 2021-07-11 · 29:51

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Overview

Casey Muratori follows up his refterm proof-of-concept, a GPU-based terminal renderer, with a second part covering memory usage, glyph sizing and correct Unicode and VT handling. It is built to show that a terminal can be fast and correct without heroic effort.

On Hacker News

HN points to it as proof that a small, straightforward renderer can beat Windows Terminal on speed and memory, whenever software slowness comes up.

Recommended by 3 HN people across 4 months · HN mentions 2021–2025

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What people said

jiggawatts · 2022-09 · Recommendation

Oh, this is nothing . Windows force-updated my Notepad.exe to the new modern UI version. It is very visibly laggy for basic actions such as opening menus or scrolling through text. You have to be spectacularly bad at programming to make something so basic so slow in 2022 on a very high-end gaming computer. Not just bad, but utterly oblivious. Casey Muratori excoriated the Windows Terminal dev team for failing to achieve a consistent 60 fps when displaying fixed-width text, which is such a trivial exercise that Casey whipped up a demo in like two weekends. [1] Now the Notepad team insisted on following in the Windows Terminal team's footprints and slowing down the other fixed-width text app that needs to be lightweight fast for all sorts of reasons. Nobody needs Notepad to be pretty. Everyone needs it to work .[2] Just amazing to see something like this happen. It's like a slow motion train wreck, ruining one Windows app at a time. [1] These videos are especially "shocking" because the code he wrote is terse, straightforward, lightning fast, and more correct than whatever madness Microsoft was doing. First weekend: [LINK] Second weekend: [VIDEO] [2] For example, opening a 300 MB log file takes a solid minute of time, which is absurdly slow. It also bloats this to 800 MB of memory usage. For comparison, TextPad opens it in 5 seconds and uses 30 MB of memory. VS Code, an electron application(!) opens in under 2 seconds.

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jiggawatts · 2021-10 · Recommendation

Don't assume. Casey Muratori produced a highly correct Unicode renderer with correct VT code support. Watch the video: [VIDEO]

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jiggawatts · 2021-08 · Recommendation

For reference, I've never seen the built-in Windows VPN protocols exceed ~70 Mbps in any scenario. Maybe it's possible with a crossover cable between two Mellanox 100 Gbps NICs, using water-cooled and overclocked CPUs, but not over ordinary networks with ordinary servers. I have gigabit wired Internet to a site with gigabit Internet. Typical performance of SSTP or IKEv2 is 15-30 Mbps. That's 1.5% to 3% max utilisation of the available bandwidth, which is just... sad. It's not the specific site either, other vendor VPNs can easily achieve > 300 Mbps over the same path. It's a year and a half into the pandemic, there are record numbers of people working from home, and Microsoft is the world's second biggest company right now. Meanwhile, volunteers put together a protocol in their spare time that is not only more secure but can also easily do 7.5 Gbps! That needs to be repeated: At least ONE HUNDRED TIMES faster than the "best" Microsoft can offer to their hundreds of millions of enterprise customers that are working from home. Someone from Microsoft's networking team needs to read this, and then watch Casey Muratori's rant about Microsoft's poor track record with performance: [VIDEO]

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Sources

Video by Molly Rocket, played through YouTube.

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