1. I knew that I had a lots of time. From a business perspective, this doesn't make perfect sense, I know. I knew C++ (sort of) and was looking for a similar language. Learning Rust took me roughly three weeks (coming from C++), it is not as complex as you think. I think the time saved hunting down null pointers has amortized that investment greatly.
2. Again, I didn't know at that time if that was the fault of Windows. All that I saw was an application that was extremely slow, written in either C++ (with Win32) or .NET (both of which are possible). Second, the application had very shitty PDF output (ex. a shape with CMYK was "emulated" by four shapes drawn on top of each other, one for black, one for magenta, etc. - lead to a completely bloated PDF). I suspected that it was the fault of the framework they were using and I didn't want to end up in a similar situation.
3. Display is actually the #1 bottleneck. You have to understand that in a real map needs to draw roughly 10000 lines, fonts, and symbols. The old program (which I had to work with), did this using Win32 drawing routines. Every time you zoom in / out, it could take 1 - 5 seconds (if lots of things were on the screen). In OpenGL, I can do it in a sub-millisecond time (using this technique -
https://blog.mapbox.com/drawing-antialiased-lines-with-openg... paired with primitive restarting in OpenGL (https://www.khronos.org/opengl/wiki/Vertex_Rendering#Primiti...). ArcGIS, for example, has DirectX acceleration, QGIS uses OpenGL. This is simply a huge annoyance when trying to work with the program.
2. Again, I didn't know at that time if that was the fault of Windows. All that I saw was an application that was extremely slow, written in either C++ (with Win32) or .NET (both of which are possible). Second, the application had very shitty PDF output (ex. a shape with CMYK was "emulated" by four shapes drawn on top of each other, one for black, one for magenta, etc. - lead to a completely bloated PDF). I suspected that it was the fault of the framework they were using and I didn't want to end up in a similar situation.
3. Display is actually the #1 bottleneck. You have to understand that in a real map needs to draw roughly 10000 lines, fonts, and symbols. The old program (which I had to work with), did this using Win32 drawing routines. Every time you zoom in / out, it could take 1 - 5 seconds (if lots of things were on the screen). In OpenGL, I can do it in a sub-millisecond time (using this technique - https://blog.mapbox.com/drawing-antialiased-lines-with-openg... paired with primitive restarting in OpenGL (https://www.khronos.org/opengl/wiki/Vertex_Rendering#Primiti...). ArcGIS, for example, has DirectX acceleration, QGIS uses OpenGL. This is simply a huge annoyance when trying to work with the program.