Comment by 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!

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tredre3

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ndiddy  2 years ago

Win32 is straightforward and easy to use until you get to COM stuff: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/shell/common...

  • Koshkin  2 years ago

    Yes, for COM programming you better switch to C++.

    • pjmlp  2 years ago

      Even then, MFC and C++/CX were the only productive ways to use it from Microsoft SDKs.

      .NET isn't as convenient as VB 6 was, fully embracing COM as the VBX replacement model, technically introduced in VB5, but still some stuff was lacking.

      Then there is Delphi and C++ Builder.

      It beat me that having doubled down on COM since how Longhorn went down, and Windows team getting their way doing avoiding .NET to take over, they hardly managed to create nice tooling as the competition.

      Editing IDL files with a Notepad like experience, manually merging generated code, and a couple of frameworks that barely go beyond yet another way to do AddRef/Release/QueryInterface and aggregation.

      Meanwhile D-BUS, XPC and AIDL, provide much better dev experience.

      Pity that Borland products are kind of tainted due to mismanagement decisions, otherwise maybe fixing COM dev experience would already been seriously taken by VS team.

      Ah, nowadays WIL is probably the best approach when having only to consume COM.

      https://github.com/microsoft/wil

      2 replies →

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.