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Comment by boromi | Hacker News Reader

Can someone help me make sense of the million and one different UI platforms on windows and why I should even consider looking into this? Being a Windows dev is very confusing when it comes to UI

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In this particular case, WinUI's appeal is that it is one UI toolkit that works across development environments and underlying languages.

This means that you can use WinUI from C++ code, or from C# code, or from .... code, rather than having to choose (and learn) a UI toolkit for each development environment.

Whether it will actually play out that way, who knows.

Microsoft has been firing UI, data access, etc. toolkits at people for the past 30 years. Every 10 or 15 years there's an actually important one that people will end up using. You can't always know which one straight away, but basically that's Win32+MFC and then WinForms for GUI. And Qt, although that's not from MS.

Yes, macOS's approach of "Cocoa or GTFO" must be seen as as strength.

anecdotal, but, as steve once said “most companies die of indigestion”... putting their weight behind one toolkit ensures everyone is working to make it the best it can be...

It probably helps that it was a fully mature toolkit inherited from another place, and came in with the return of Steve Jobs, so it would be pretty politically untenable to start trying to ditch it.

It's really interesting to me that stark difference between MS's GUI framework fire-and-motion, vs macOS's stability. Why couldn't MS do that? They have c# vs macOS's objective-C, perhaps it's because MS wanted to have a decent C++ UI framework, but the Windows-8/modern app direction they took added to the fragmentation.

WinUI 3.0 finally offers some of the "Carbon" to Windows 8's "Cocoa" (in XAML Islands and better overall interop with Win32 and older OS releases). Microsoft's attempt to go "Cocoa only" missed the "Carbon" stage that that their own application teams internally warned them they would probably need (as those same teams had warned Apple about in the originally "Rhapsody" plan to skip an intermediate stage like "Carbon" entirely). Maybe after WinUI 3.0 has been out the door for a while and more apps transition to targeting WinUI 3.0 they can think about killing Win32 only and going "Cocoa only".

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