Comment by Scharkenberg
13 hours ago
While Win32 tends to deliver the most resource-efficient and responsive apps if the complexity is not high, I have settled on the latest .NET + C# + Windows App SDK / WinUI 3. Making an app look good and fit into the modern Windows look is extremely hard with Win32 C/C++ and writing and maintaining it requires energy that I'd rather spend elsewhere. Besides, modern frameworks are making great strides in speed, efficiency and QoL features. .NET 11 is full of optimizations, for example.
Why not use something like wxWidgets?
I've tried this and found the WinUI deployment model frustrating and user hostile. There are like 5 open issues on GitHub where people seem deeply confused (I'm one of them) as to if it's possible to build a plain .NET .exe. Some people have tried it and it "works", others try it and get obscure errors, it's a real mess.
Not everything is flowers and sunshine (got a couple of open issues myself... in .NET MAUI too), but whether one can build a single, compact, self-contained exe does not define the hostility of a framework or platform, IMO. .NET was conceived as an enterprise-friendly development framework and that's where it shines the most. Quick-and-dirty/mean-and-lean/distribute-and-forget development was never its forte. I would appreciate that feature too, but it's largely a non-issue.