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Comment by dfgdfgffd | Hacker News Reader

Sadly Rust for WinUI3/UWP/XAML for Windows GUI - actually modern UIs on Windows - was abandoned or explicitly removed from Rust API bindings by MS.

The listed library only uses the ancient win32 api

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Doesn't surprise me, the folks behind it are the same that caused the deprecation from C++/CX, the very first time that Microsoft had something comparable to C++ Builder in productivity for C++ RAD GUI development.

It got replaced with C++/WinRT, which basically requires one to code like in the good old days of Visual C++ 6.0 alongside ATL, editing IDL files without any kind of VS tooling support and manually merging generated code.

Even the eldery MFC has better VS tooling support and COM authoring APIs than C++/WinRT.

Rust/WinRT is even years away from the C++/WinRT "productivity" in its current state, let along what .NET tooling provides, which by the way is also worse than UWP with .NET Native (e.g. no designer available, and no AOT support).

The reality is that only WinDev folks actually care enough about WinUI, the rest of us have moved on burned by these rewrites, and only a few hardcore advocates keep showing up their community calls.

Which is a massive bummer because win ui stuff w designer etc used to be great and performed better than a lot of electron stuff and was easy to develop - but they have seriously trashed their ecosystem there

Yeah, if you browse around the public repos, and occasional community calls, it really seems that whoever is still around has no idea (experience) of what are the features of the frameworks they are trying to replace, and asking for yet another rewrite on top of all of those done since Windows 8 is trivial.

Anyone that is still around beyond WinDev themselves just has too much sunk down cost into WinUI to switch for something else, even pre-Windows 8 stacks.

Sadly?

I prefer desktop Windows programs to be gdi/win32, they are often the most thought out and optimized for actual desktop paradigms (i.e mouse+keyboard+high res screen) without giant margins, padding and whitespace everywhere and makes use of proper desktop class widgets like treeviews, listviews, tabs, etc.

Exactly. Haters gonna hate me but I really liked Windows.Forms (and C#) for development line-of-business desktop apps.

Nah, still quite good, although I personally would go with WPF, Forms is also quite good for what still matters on Windows desktop, just note that on the new runtime (.NET Core) there are still some issues with the out of process designer.

Windows offers multiple and mixed paradigms though, so ideally the UI needs to be able to adapt to and handle these paradigms

Any idea why?! I find that the modern WinUI is impossible to use from any language other than .NET.

Perhaps that's the plan?

We yanked it because, sadly, XAML/WinUI is squarely designed to be used with C# and Visual Studio.

win32 api is pretty good. I don't see why you would want anything else for native app development. If you want to use the modern stuff it's far better to develop the UI frontend using Microsoft tools in C# and then use Rust as the backend. In this sense Rust story is not worse than C++ or C.

If a person wants a native gui I guess QT would be worth investigating as well (unless one is concerned by the license).

There ist at least some support for XAML via C++.

But yes, it means C# UI with cumbersome Rust interop, if you rely on a Rust SDK.

There is, for those that enjoy editing IDL files without any kind of VS tooling support, and manually merging generated code.

Isn't that what the windows-rs crate is for? Doesn't seem abandoned.

It sure is abandoned: https://github.com/microsoft/windows-app-rs#this-repository-...

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