Comment by dgellow

2 years ago

I found this repo while looking for an equivalent to Win32 hello world[0] as a learning exercise during a long flight (with my work MacBook instead of my personal Windows machines).

That's something I really like about Windows APIs — I can pick a new programming language I want to play with, as long as there is a way to interface with C I can try to port the Win32 hello world then play around.

0: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/learnwin32/y...

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dgellow

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tredre3  2 years ago

The WIN32 API is somewhat ugly. I hate how all types are capitalized and their short abbreviations in arguments are sometimes weird. I hate how they have their own version of lots of standard C types that you have to be careful about (they weren't standard at the time, to be fair).

But it's quite straightforward and easy to use. Any language that has FFI can call into it and build GUI apps, I've made a windowed Hello World in PHP with it.

And it has been that way for 30+ years at this point. It's quite remarkable, really!

  • QuercusMax  2 years ago

    I remember ages ago when I was about 12, I got a copy of Turbo C++ for Windows 3.1 for my birthday. (I had only written in Basic before, and wanted to learn a "real" programming language. My dad was a Fortran programming physicist, and had heard that C++ was what everyone was using then-a-days.) I mostly wrote simple console programs, and it came with the Borland ObjectWindows library with a fun GUI builder, but there was a section in the manual talking about how to write directly using the Windows API.

    I didn't really understand any of what I was reading, but I typed in the whole basic sample complete with HWNDs and all that nonsense. I can't remember if I could even get it to compile, but the idea of an event-loop was beyond my comprehension as a 12yo. I'm sure if I went back it would make a lot more sense to me, but back in 1994 it seemed like dark magic, especially compared to the much simpler and more understandable OWL components.