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Comment by codeflo | Hacker News Reader

You probably mean Win16/Win32, not WinForms. But it only survives in the sense that it’s still there, not in the sense that it’s still useful. How many applications created in the last five years use Win32 for anything but creating a top-level window (usually via Chromium/Electron)?

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> How many applications created in the last five years use Win32 for anything but creating a top-level window (usually via Chromium/Electron)?

I think that you're in a bubble for that one. Many business domain-specific applications are still directly written against Win32 even today. UWP didn't manage to catch up for now either.

Electron usage is mostly only in startup-y apps and some IDEs.

No experience is universal, so I'm curious in what industry you encounter Win32. Or do you mean WinForms? I often work with industrial manufacturing companies in Europe, with a mindset about as far from that of Silicon Valley startups as you can imagine. You usually won't find Electron there. Many "legacy" projects are in WinForms. But for newer stuff, I see lots of WPF and Qt projects, both of which don't use native controls.

Qt has more impact as far as I can see. However, where I went, I didn't see it resulting with anything deployed to production yet...

That is also my experience.

Outside games, most modern Windows applications, specially in the areas you mention, I have also seen WPF/Qt, with plain old Win32 just as glue for underlying OS APIs.

There are still some odd ones that keep doing MFC, or enjoy a mix of Delphi/C++ Builder.

The only old style C Win32 applications I have seen in the wild during the last decade tend to be surviving applications from the 90's, done by companies not so much into Windows C++ frameworks.

How many Windows applications have been created in the last five years at all?

Not much of a PC gamer, are you? :)

We were talking about widget libs and non-cross-platform apps, so PC games didn't come to mind for both reasons.

I still mourn the days of shareware.

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