The painful bit is C++. I did a fair bit of that going back to MFC. Knocking stuff out in C# with WPF and WinForms was quite nice in comparison. I haven’t found anything nicer.
The old RAD graphical tools and newer ones like Rebol (that are now dated) show just what is possible. Mathematica is also pretty powerful and doesn't require a ton of code.
I’ll get shot for this one but I write most of my GUIs in Excel these days.
You should be proud like that.
Less useful these days as we use open formats, ie doc is propriatery, docx is open
I'm sorry but referring to MFC while referring C++ is a telltale sign you don't really have any meaningful experience in the field. Developing GUI apps for Windows is a breeze with frameworks like Qt. You only suffer if you're a masochist, but the rest of us prefer to pick things that make sense.
How do you manage a 15 million LOC desktop app originating from the late 90s which contains chunks of win32 native, ATL, MFC, custom GDI+ wrappers all sorts?
Aye you fuck off and work somewhere else that's what you do. Which is why it's still written in win32 native, ATL, MFC, custom GDI+ wrappers.
They paid two companies to come in and rewrite it, first in Qt which was a complete failure. Then in Electron etc, which was also a failure.
You're complaining about your personal legacy "chunks of win32 native, ATL, MFC, custom GDI+ wrappers".
Not C++. Just your personal legacy projects you didn't managed to maintain or update.
C++ doesn't magically rewrite your technical debt. You need to do your work.