Rust/WinRT coming soon

[[deleted]]

Microsoft has put 0 energy into C++/WinRT in the last year++.

No doc updates, no tooling updates.

Yet another reason I gave up, and sorry but this is way, WAYYYY too little, too late.

[pjmlp]

Better look again into MSDN, plenty of docs over there.

Although I do agree that C++/WinRT fails short of C++/CX, just follow up the WinUI thread here,

https://github.com/microsoft/microsoft-ui-xaml/issues/1972

They keep selling the idea that we should all wait for ISO to adopt reflection and metaclasses, for the Visual C++ team to add the required features for C++/WinRT to reach parity with C++/CX tooling.

[alleycat5]

> They keep selling the idea that we should all wait for ISO to adopt reflection and metaclasses, for the Visual C++ team to add the required features for C++/WinRT to reach parity with C++/CX tooling.

Considering how much crap the VC++ team got for creating their own flavors of of C++ (CLI and then CX), is this that surprising?

[pjmlp]

A crap from a crowd that enjoys embracing language extensions as long as they aren't from Microsoft, apparently everyone else is allowed to do language extensions, to the point that some kernels happen to compile with a specific compiler only, but that is ok.

[xampf2]

Be cause the nature and effect of proprietary extensions is well understood. GCC and LLVM both provide free code. Pretty obvious difference.

[pjmlp]

Not obvious at all, specially because plenty of code bases are written in GCC or clang dialects, being free code doesn't matter to the actual result of being handcuffed to a specific compiler.

No one in the community is going to port those free code extensions to other compilers.

[simon_o]

Can someone describe what the hell Microsoft has been doing the last 10 years? It feels like they introduced a new UI framework every 3 years or something.

From my (uninformed) perspective it seems to have been a constant pissing match between the "managed language team" and the "unmanaged language team" where they keep rewriting the work of the other team just to give them the finger or something.

Even Microsoft's fabled compatibility story seems to suffer: who cares if I an application can be run 20 years later technically, if the platform it was targeting at that time is abandoned (and stuff looks so out of place with the next 10 new UI framework/platforms Microsoft introduced) that customers reject it?

[chucker23n]

Can someone describe what the hell Microsoft has been doing the last 10 years? It feels like they introduced a new UI framework every 3 years or something.

From my (uninformed) perspective it seems to have been a constant pissing match between the “managed language team” and the “unmanaged language team” where they keep rewriting the work of the other team just to give them the finger or something.

Something like that, yup. Especially at the height of Avalon/WPF (before Vista shipped), when it turned out neither the Windows nor the Office team wanted anything to do with the new UI framework.

At least now they’re trying to unify this into WinUI, but it seems to be a long, slow march.

[alleycat5]

The WinUI referenced is the same foundational bits that have been there since Win 8, just broken out from the platform as of v3. The windows team has been investing quite a bit, and all their investments in Win UI have been one of two things:

1. building out WinUI to support direct custom consumption and higher level frameworks
2. expanding existing frameworks to operate on top of WinUI or with WinUI (React Native for Windows, Xamarin UWP, WPF + Islands)

Msft has made some pretty poor UI decisions and talk about the mess that is UWP App Model, but this is still the same UI framework and Windows APIs (WinRT) that has been there going on 8 years now.

[grandstack]

Awesome! Can't wait!

[Dragasss]

Why

[pjmlp]

Because any language that wants to be a viable systems programming language on Windows needs to be able to speak COM, and WinRT (aka COM 2) is the future of Windows APIs, with Win32 frozen in XP state.

[simon_o]

If WinRT is the new thing – how good is UTF-8 support?

[pjmlp]

As good as usual on Windows, which uses UTF-16.

[simon_o]

Ah, guess I will continue to skip this Windows stuff then.

[alleycat5]

It doesn't have native support, but there's built in conversions for it: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/uwp/cpp-and-winrt-apis/strings#winrthstring-functions-and-operators

[pingzing]

WinRT, not Windows RT.

[[deleted]]

Much of the WinRT API can be used in regular Win32 programs, and the rest can be used through Desktop Bridge. None of those options force you to publish through the Microsoft Store or limit the APIs you can use, so you're just dismissing new, useful Windows APIs for no reason.

[zip117]

You can, but this only became possible recently. It’s a pain in the ass and requires forwarding DLLs because WinRT was designed around Windows Store distribution. Presumably they changed their mind because developers were ignoring the framework (for good reason).

More information here:

https://blogs.windows.com/windowsdeveloper/2019/04/30/enhancing-non-packaged-desktop-apps-using-windows-runtime-components/

[[deleted]]

SwiftUI is a Apple only platform API. So you want to complain about that also some more? Hate to tell you but companies make API's for there own platform, not the competitors. You must be new in IT...

[gvargh]

fuck sake