Comment by mschaef

6 years ago

> Win32, especially when it comes to GUI programming, is one of the worst APIs out there.

It's also one of the first. Win32's origins extend back over 35 years and start on machines with a tiny fraction of the capability of even the smallest of today's modern PC's. It was also built with a different set of tradeoffs and in a radically different culture of software development. (Most modern developers hadn't been born at the time of it's initial design, and most of the people who were actively writing this stuff in the early-to-mid 1980's, I'm sure have moved on. 35 years is pretty much a career.)

> MFC is also quite bad because of huge abstraction leakages; it fills like Win32 with bolted on classes.

That's pretty much what it was... by design. There was a more object-oriented library that Microsoft developed, prior to MFC. They tested it on developers that had essentially just come up to speed on the (then-new) Win16 API, who all complained about having to ascend another learning curve for a fancy object oriented language and framework. Microsoft's reaction was to drop the older framework (referred to as AFX) and develop MFC as a thin wrapper around Win16. (This is part of why there are AFX prefixes scattered throughout the MFC codebase.... it's a legacy of the earlier framework.)

Even then, early versions of MFC had some utility, mainly around making things more type safe. Because it bound C++ instances to Window system instances, it made it easy to attach user data structures to UI components. (Otherwise, you were worrying about window or class words, which were Microsoft's original approach to that problem and used by MFC under the hood.) MFC also handled parsing of window message arguments. Win16 also sent messages with just a word and a long, when what you really might need is a set of mouse button flags and an x/y position or something. MFC helped with that too, by 'cracking' the message arguments into something closer to what you'd expect.

(To this day, Win32 documentation still includes instructions on parsing WPARAMS, etc.