Never thought of that. Is that why the Settings app is so slow? If I click on one of the menu items on the left, it takes half a second or more to load the screen.
SwiftUI doesn't help, but each panel is a separate process. The previous version of System Preferences hid the delay by showing an animation, the new one doesn't.
I still think they could easily load quicker though. Even switching between the different menu items in Settings takes long, when going back to ones that you already used earlier. They don't seem to be doing a lot of caching. At least they could keep those processes running for a while.
Unless it's actually SwiftUI taking time to render that UI, which would be bizarre.
As a macOS user I am so used to everything happening in the blink of an eye, so this is something that stands out. It's really not a big problem, 300-400ms.
Ok, let me rewind a little. Are preference panes actually running apps? I imagined them more conceptually similar to an HTML form that System Settings displayed and processed and then wrote the results back to a plist or whatever. And in that model, there wouldn’t be a clear advantage to having separate processes.
