alt Hacker NewsI'm an embedded programmer who occassionally needs to write various windows programs to interface with embedded devices (usually via serial port or usb), and I find it a breeze to write native gui programs in pure win32 and c++.
Recently had to add a new feature to and old program that was last updated in the XP era and two things to note:
1. The program did not need to be updated to run on Vista, 7, 10 and 11, shit just kept working throughout the years.
2. I loaded the project into Visual Studio 2022, it converted from VC6 and compiled without problems, added the feature, shipped a new .exe to the customer, and it just worked.
What other platform has that backwards and forwards compatibility success story?
Replies
I feel like I'm the only person in the world who would rather write ugly win32 jank for the rest of my days than ever having to touch an "elegant" or "well structured" Cocoa codebase. In win32 if you want a button you call a function and pass a hande, in the Apple world you first subclass 7 interfaces in some unreadable Smalltalk-wannabe syntax and pray you don't need to access the documentation. And of course they constantly change things because breaking backwards compatibility is Apple's kink.
To me this kind of "no need to change anything" implies stability but there's a younger cohort of developers who are used to everything changing every week and who think that something that is older than week is "unmaintained" and thus buggy and broken.
The one big challenge I've had with big legacy Win32/C++ codebases is migrating it fully from 32bit to 64bit. Loads of know-how and docs for complex GUI controls and structs are lost to time, or really fragmented. Other than that, yeah it really does all just work once you're past that.
Yeah that doesn't always work that well. Think you were lucky.
Add high DPI to the mix and things get rough very quickly. Also the common control have weird input issues (try ctrl+backspace in an Edit control). All those little things need to be fixed carefully for something to be ok in 2026.
‘Madness is something rare in individuals — but in groups, parties, peoples, and ages, it is the rule’ —F. Nietzsche
(tongue in cheek)
But that’s the point the article’s making. At the C level you’ve got a fully functional system. Above that level (even at the C++ level), feature support is a mess.
And the 12 different ways to define a string depending on which API you call
Same here - our IOT device is a i5 running Windows IOT. Recently I switched from C++/Win32 to Golang and walk.
Winforms?
lol at them still bekng the best option. so much wasted effort trying to replace them
Honestly, your GUIs are too simple to be part of this conversation. Try writing something like Spotify in WinAPI and that's not even a complicated GUI either.
I've not done MFC Win32 programming since 1999 but if I recall those programs don't execute the main() function. They instantiate the Win32 class for your app or something like that. I can't remember any details anymore.