Comment by adzm
13 hours ago
Win32 API is great and responsive; ATL/WTL (and MFC) are still very useful abstractions with little cost. The biggest pain point is having to handle a lot of things manually, like DPI awareness (and themed controls). Even things like Emoji and other modern text features are not available through GDI and require DirectWrite iirc. Still, I'm surprised how useful it manages to be regardless how old it is.
When you say responsive, you mean like it reacts quickly, or it responds to screen size?
In web we refer to the latter but i feel you mean the former.
I built a toy project in .NET 2005[0] with WinForms and the experience was actually excellent, binding data to controls was dead simple, it felt surprisingly modern. But i can't imagine how I'd make the UI resizable lol
[0]https://github.com/queenkjuul/spotify97
Probably more responsive.
Windows apps always had to be able to respond to dynamically changing screen dimensions since the user could change from one screen resolution to another while an app was still running. Apps would get a WM_DISPLAYCHANGE message in their top-level windows message processing loop. Docs say WM_DISPLAYCHANGE was introduced in Win95.