Re: M$
It's 2015.
You're kidding right?
Searching a list of even 2000 text entries is the kind of thing you can do in microseconds on a ZX Spectrum.
The upper limit should really be some integer limit (e.g. long int or long long int), not something pathetic in the thousands. Seriously. If you CANNOT search through 2000 4Kb records in less than a second, you're doing something incredibly, atrociously, catastrophically wrong.
For reference, even something like MySQL, SQLite or similar can do plain text or even content searches (you DO index the contents rather than then go into every shortcut and manually extract the information on each search, right?) on the order of Gb/s. I fail to believe that a start menu contains more than a few meg of information, even for someone like me with thousands of organised folders in the Start Menu (hint: 1.3Mb at the moment, not counting "all users" start menus). We're literally talking search-as-you-type with no optimisations needed.
Honestly, is this what coding has come to? You really think that searching through a list of even a million Start Menu items should take more than a fraction of a second?
Nobody wants infinity. I want it to take as long as it takes, no matter what number I have. If it gets too slow, I'll reduce the number. It's not hard to operate on these principles - we all do for inbox quotas, disk size, profile size, etc. What I don't want is "Sorry, you have more than a few thousand files... I'm not going to work".
P.S. Classic Shell has ZERO PROBLEMS accessing that amount of icons, including narrow-down search, as a third-party bit of freeware. I'm sure MS can do better than that if they tried.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
