@chakie I spent the first 20’ish years of my career writing Windows apps, so I owe my career to Windows in some ways. It was a different time. We had the Windows API, AKA Win32, and things were pretty uniform. Today it seems a complete wreck.
@fahrni It seems to be the only API that has survived more than three years. If you look at a modern Windows box even the OS itself uses dozens of UI (and web) frameworks for basic management/productivity applications. It’s a mess.
@chakie Why they’re not using C,C++,C#, or Rust with WinUI 3 is beyond me.
If I were in charge of it I’d go Rust + WinUI 3 for all OS apps and utilities. Just build a priority list and go top to bottom. Reuse certain bits and wrap them in new UI. The Calculator app is a great example of that. They did a new UI and used the existing C guts.
@fahrni Is Win3 something that’s here to stay for more than three years? I feel like MS hasn’t been able to standardise on any UI framework since Win32. So much fledgling around, new stuff and deprecations. To me actual language seems like a smaller thing, as long as everything uses the same UI framework, same standards and is at least remotely uniform.
@chakie Kind of. Microsoft is, as I understand it, moving to WinUI slowly with their apps. I believe most system level apps use it now, but I could be VERY wrong.
Last I heard Edge was using Win32 still because it had to run on Windows 7 at the time. Who knows now?
React Native for Windows uses WinUI. Last I saw it was WinUI 2 but it could be WinUI 3 by now.
It’s what I’d choose. Microsoft’s UI story was so tight for so long, now it’s just a big mess.
I’d use Swift as my language of choice.
@chakie Microsoft *should* integrate Win3 UI into Windows and deprecate all Win32 UI support so folks start moving. Give people time to adopt it.
Or, they could make Win32 UI code wrap Win3 UI so it just works for old apps.
I like the deprecation method. Push folks to move forward.
@fahrni MS has always been extremely good at keeping old applications running, something that's awful on the Mac or even Linux. Maybe they should keep old runtime libs in place to let old cruft continue to run but remove any development support for them to that way force things slowly forward. Just using the same UI framework will on its own not make Windows a coherent desktop.
@chakie Raymond Chen and a team of other Softies did some compatibility code to adapt Win32 APIs to use modern code underneath. I can't find the repository, but one does exist.
You can mix Win32 and WinUI 3 together. The reason I'd do the UI first is because they could work to re-unify the look and feel of the OS. Going below that may be a moot point if Win32 remains forever.
Did I link to the Windows Calculator project? They did it right. Old C code that does the work was left alone.
@fahrni Curious why you would choose Swift? It's pretty nice, but it's a very complicated language to get things right with. The compiler as it is now is pretty slow and can fail at simple arithmetic expressions.
@chakie Well, it's a simple matter, really. I enjoy Swift and have for about 10 years now, which is crazy to think. I like it better than Objective-C. I spent 20 years doing C/C++ code and enjoy it but it now feels like a chore when I go back to it. My feed reader is 100% Swift and I'd like to port it to Windows someday. If I can get the core of it, that would be great!
I would, however, go back to writing C/C++ on Windows if someone wanted to hire me to work on Windows desktop apps.
@fahrni Oh yeah, I did loads of Objective C too, and while it was kind of nice I can't say I miss it at all. Swift is much better and the number of memory bugs I write has dropped dramatically. Logic bugs, not so much. :)
It does however seem like the UI story with Swift outside the Apple ecosystem isn't exactly great. Server side Swift is great on Linux (Vapor and similar), but I'm not even aware of any UI frameworks. Have you stumbled upon any?
@chakie There is a complete “projection" for WinUI 3, for Swift, and one for Rust.
Now I can't find it! Here's some basic instructions. https://www.swift.org/install/windows/
@fahrni Is it properly supported? I mean, is it something one could really build an app on? Rust is in the same boat, it doesn’t really have any good normal and modern UI frameworks. Maybe Swift could adopt Jetpack Compose as Apple doesn’t want to open source SwiftUI?
@chakie Rust is fully supported on Windows and Mac. You just use the platform UI toolkit.
Same for Swift on Windows. Just use WinUI 3.