alt Hacker NewsI think that the native GUI development APIs provided by OS vendors need a kind of "headless" implementation first, where you can build UI in pure code like winforms, and then they should offer a framework on top of that. I, personally, hate XAML. It's stricter than HTML/CSS and very opinionated about how to organize your application. I feel that XAML frameworks should have a common Winforms-like API behind them that you can switch to any time you want. But I've found that using the C# code-behind APIs manually for WPF, UWP, MAUI, etc, is far more verbose than Winforms was.
My only major problem with winforms is that it's still using GDI under the hood which, despite what many people believe, is actually still primarily software-rendered. If they could just swap out Winforms for Direct2D under the hood (or at least allow a client hint at startup to say "prefer Direct2D") it would really bring new life to Winforms, I think.
I would also like a C++ native GUI API that's more modern than MFC
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Unfortunately that is something Microsoft seems incapable of.
MFC was already relatively bad versus OWL. Borland[0] kept improving it with VCL and nowadays FireMonkey.
There there is Qt as well.
Microsoft instead came up with ATL, and when they finally had something that could rival C++ Builder, with C++/CX, a small group managed to replace it with C++/WinRT because they didn't like extensions, the irony.
With complete lack of respect for paying customers, as C++/WinRT never ever had the same Visual Studio tooling experience as C++/CX.
Nowadays it is in maintenance, stuck in C++17, working just good enough for WinUI 3.0 and WinAppSDK implementation work, and the riot group is having fun with Rust's Windows bindings.
So don't expect anything good coming from Microsoft in regards to modern C++ GUI frameworks.
[0] - Yes nowadays others are at the steering wheel.
"C# Markup" [1] [2] sounds a lot like what you are looking for. As the only "second party" option in this space it's interesting that it is so MAUI only/MAUI focused, but I suppose that's the "new hotness".
There have been similar F# libraries and third-party C# libraries for a while that seem nice to work with in similar ways.
[1] https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/apps/windows-dotne...
[2] https://github.com/CommunityToolkit/Maui.Markup