Live data from Hacker News

Rust/WinRT Public Preview

blogs.windows.com

121–130 of 219 posts

Re: Rust/WinRT Public Preview

#121

Coding in C++/WinRT (similaly, C++/CX) is in my experience a major mistake when targeting WinRT/UWP using C++. The primary use case for WinRT/UWP is making apps for the Microsoft Store, where most of the time you're going to be sharing code also targeting Google Play and the Apple Store given those markets are vastly larger (and have viable ad-platforms; Microsoft is shutting theirs down on June 1st). The C++/WinRT a…

I think C++/WinRT is more of a "modern C++" projection than C++/CX, and they aren't an also-known-as, although they meet similar goals. For example, with the ^ reference:

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/uwp/cpp-and-winrt-a...

Re: Rust/WinRT Public Preview

#122
post #55
post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Added their own packages version of every package. > Added their own package repository (MRAN), replacing CRAN. How is any of this different than the many incompatible Linux packaging solutions? How would you address insecurity and trust relations if you weren't a first-class contributor of CRAN? (consider the recent Python package exploit; although amateur, it's still an indication of such issues; I'm sure I remem…

> I am very familiar with corporate culture, security, and liability awareness I thought the same thing many years ago. I was speaking with a friend ( many years ago) who used to work for microsoft. I said, "so they broke something and didn't support this, they're just developers and how do they know all the issues?" Basically, I was saying the coders were human, and sometimes getting something out is hard. My friend…

And now Google do the same in the browser. They're regularly being called out by Mozilian but most people dismiss it as "the coders are human".

Re: Rust/WinRT Public Preview

#123

Coding in C++/WinRT (similaly, C++/CX) is in my experience a major mistake when targeting WinRT/UWP using C++. The primary use case for WinRT/UWP is making apps for the Microsoft Store, where most of the time you're going to be sharing code also targeting Google Play and the Apple Store given those markets are vastly larger (and have viable ad-platforms; Microsoft is shutting theirs down on June 1st). The C++/WinRT a…

C++/WinRT and C++/CX are not the same; they are different enough that Microsoft Docs has a whole page explaining how to move from C++/CX to C++/WinRT: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/uwp/cpp-and-winrt-a... In particular only the older C++/CX has ^ pointers or other Microsoft-specific C++ language extensions. C++/WinRT is standard C++. Writing your code using WRL (Windows Runtime C++ template Library) is good…

Updated my post - I had forgotten C++/WinRT discarded the ^ syntax as we skipped C++/WinRT for our development as it suffers from many of the same problems of C++/CX.

Re: Rust/WinRT Public Preview

#124
post #15

You have to hand it to Microsoft: It may be the only large software company that doesn't seem susceptible to not-invented-here syndrome. It's true that Microsoft historically has been an intensely competitive company, often trying to undermine competing technologies, e.g., with "embrace and extend" strategies. But whenever a competing technology -- whether a language, or a framework, or an application -- gains adopti…

Right now they seem to have an enormous theme of winning over developers, of all kinds, for all platforms. I would say it's to sell them tools, but most of the recently-headlining MS tools have been free. Maybe it's just to garner general goodwill. Maybe it's to draw people to Azure. I can't quite see the strategy, but it's a very clear theme behind many of their recent (publicly-facing) efforts.

Re: Rust/WinRT Public Preview

#125
post #124
post #15

You have to hand it to Microsoft: It may be the only large software company that doesn't seem susceptible to not-invented-here syndrome. It's true that Microsoft historically has been an intensely competitive company, often trying to undermine competing technologies, e.g., with "embrace and extend" strategies. But whenever a competing technology -- whether a language, or a framework, or an application -- gains adopti…

Right now they seem to have an enormous theme of winning over developers, of all kinds, for all platforms. I would say it's to sell them tools, but most of the recently-headlining MS tools have been free. Maybe it's just to garner general goodwill. Maybe it's to draw people to Azure. I can't quite see the strategy, but it's a very clear theme behind many of their recent (publicly-facing) efforts.

MS has a huge legacy market, they don't want to end up as the next oracle where every dev relentlessly argues to move to a different platform.

Making tools/functionality free such that existing devs don't want to jump, and new devs consider azure is a reasonable business strategy.

Re: Rust/WinRT Public Preview

#126
post #125
post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right now they seem to have an enormous theme of winning over developers, of all kinds, for all platforms. I would say it's to sell them tools, but most of the recently-headlining MS tools have been free. Maybe it's just to garner general goodwill. Maybe it's to draw people to Azure. I can't quite see the strategy, but it's a very clear theme behind many of their recent (publicly-facing) efforts.

MS has a huge legacy market, they don't want to end up as the next oracle where every dev relentlessly argues to move to a different platform. Making tools/functionality free such that existing devs don't want to jump, and new devs consider azure is a reasonable business strategy.

Except two of the biggest platforms they've been focusing on are the web and Android, and they've publicly stated that they don't necessarily see the future as a Windows-world. Azure is the only platform that I see these efforts helping, and maybe that's enough, but I still have to wonder if there's something I'm missing.

Re: Rust/WinRT Public Preview

#127
post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Microsoft you remember is at a time when dev tools were "the future". They are now the past. Microsoft's ruthlessness is no doubt focused elsewhere now. For example, do they go out of their way to make your code portable b/w Azure and Google? Probably not.

Off the top of my head here are three different offerings from Microsoft that enable cross cloud applications: - https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/services/azure-arc/ - https://dapr.io/ - https://keda.sh/

The runtime for their serverless functions is also open source and (I guess) fairly portable: https://github.com/Azure/azure-functions-host

Re: Rust/WinRT Public Preview

#128
post #15

You have to hand it to Microsoft: It may be the only large software company that doesn't seem susceptible to not-invented-here syndrome. It's true that Microsoft historically has been an intensely competitive company, often trying to undermine competing technologies, e.g., with "embrace and extend" strategies. But whenever a competing technology -- whether a language, or a framework, or an application -- gains adopti…

From firsthand experience... Microsoft has quite a bit of NIH syndrome. Still does. They've just gotten better about it in recent years.

One good example is Microsoft adding dtrace to Windows. The Linux community has floundered for years with several competing tracing tools, all of which have major deficiencies in one way or another.

Re: Rust/WinRT Public Preview

#129
post #15

You have to hand it to Microsoft: It may be the only large software company that doesn't seem susceptible to not-invented-here syndrome. It's true that Microsoft historically has been an intensely competitive company, often trying to undermine competing technologies, e.g., with "embrace and extend" strategies. But whenever a competing technology -- whether a language, or a framework, or an application -- gains adopti…

It's in their blood - its the 'Embrace' in EEE.

I don't think they really have the power to extinguish anymore. Sure, Windows is still dominant in the desktop market, but that's not where the novel software is being written.

Amazon is the king of EEE these days. Microsoft is desperately trying to remain relevant.

Re: Rust/WinRT Public Preview

#130
post #15

You have to hand it to Microsoft: It may be the only large software company that doesn't seem susceptible to not-invented-here syndrome. It's true that Microsoft historically has been an intensely competitive company, often trying to undermine competing technologies, e.g., with "embrace and extend" strategies. But whenever a competing technology -- whether a language, or a framework, or an application -- gains adopti…

> It may be the only large software company that doesn't seem susceptible to not-invented-here syndrome. .NET?

.NET, ActiveX, JScript, etc.
Post reply on HN