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Comment by pjmlp | Hacker News Reader

And better not touch C++/WinRT, it makes that experience a few notches up.

WinRT isn't the most awful in the world to use from, say, Rust because there are auto-generated bindings, but I agree that C++ can be awful.

WinRT was great, back when using it via .NET Native and C++/CX.

It was like Delphi and C++ Builder kind of experience, then they killed the whole experience.

Rust with windows-rs is hardly any better, and coming from the same folks that killed C++/CX, with false promises at CppCon 2017, I don't have great hopes for it. They will jump ship again after a new shiny.

The thing is, at least compiled programming languages are statically typed. XAML is... well I don't think they even have a language server for it. My experience in Visual Studio (non-Code) was pretty bad.

Because the idea is to use the designer, not write it by hand.

Well, until they killed the designer for WinUI 3.0, yet another flaw they don't talk about.

At least still around for Forms, WPF.

I think my favorite cross-platform GUI library is wxWidgets, because you can manually construct an interface from nested linear layouts, which is the way I prefer to construct my interfaces.

Apple seems to have a much more powerful constraint system for this sort of thing, but I haven't taken the time to learn it yet, so I can't speak to whether I'd prefer it or not.

Speaking of Delphi - they should just buy Embarcadero and make Delphi and CppBuilder available for small money. That way they might get more and better apps for their platform again.

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