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Comment by sn_master | Hacker News Reader

In fairness, not that many people (including Microsoft) write native C++ apps for Windows anymore, certainly not without tried and tested libraries.

You can write C# code dealing with reading/writing files once and compile it on Linux/Windows/Mac and it'll work pretty much the exact same.

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Microsoft does write native C++ apps for Windows all the time.

First of all, games are apps, second even if apps unit keeps mostly ignoring WinUI/UWP (written in C++), whatever they do with Web widgets is mostly backed by C++ code, not C#.

On of the reasons why VSCode is mostly usable despite being Electron, is exactly the amount of external processes written in C++.

Applications being written in .NET is mostly on the Azure side.

Microsoft has literal teams with budgets of several millions USD just for the file open/save in Office which is written in C++.

Those file/save dialogs are an application of their own, and with multiple versions across all supported platforms.

But despite that they cannot fix it. Consistently they make perhaps the worst APIs of any major tech company.

True. They broke the basic Windows search functionality some time in 2007 and broke Outlook search around 2013 and neither of which have been fixed since.

Maybe for file handling in C++, but DirectX/HLSL is the best Graphics API I've worked with and C# is easily my favorite language to develop in. It's easy for us to talk shit about Win32 today, 30 years after it was initially developed, but there are myriad historical reasons why UTF-16 is used by Java, Windows, and other languages/runtime environments and why it's not simple to just break compatibility with decades of software running at hospitals and financial trading firms because the 32 year old armchair experts at HN said so.

According to wikipedia:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_Coded_Character_Set

> The UCS has over 1.1 million possible code points available for use/allocation, but only the first 65,536, which is the Basic Multilingual Plane (BMP), had entered into common use before 2000. This situation began changing when the People's Republic of China (PRC) ruled in 2006 that all software sold in its jurisdiction would have to support GB 18030. This required software intended for sale in the PRC to move beyond the BMP.

I will take Win32 over anything related to X Windows, OpenGL and Vulkan, with pleasure.

“Applications being written in .NET is mostly on the Azure side.”

You are of course, wrong about this. Most .Net/C# code is not Azure (yet anyway) -related; it is the billions of lines of enterprise application code across businesses around the world (for me, since 2001)…

You are not Microsoft apps unit, the subject of what is being discussed here.

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