Earlier quoted context omitted.
Doesn't WINE have pretty decent documentation by now from all the reverse engineering?
Wine cannot even install office 2014. It's not really as food as some claim sadly.
Lutris can up to 2016.
Windows native app development is a mess
51–60 of 481 posts
Re: Windows native app development is a mess
#52Most of the desktop applications I have wrote over the years have been in other languages like Java and Go as I have wanted them to mostly be cross platform. In these cases I have always used the Software UI, which in Java is Swing and in Go is Fyne. These are usually reasonably fast, don't necessarily look native depending on how its themed but ultimately fit the language better than trying to bridge to Win32 or GTK/QT.
Re: Windows native app development is a mess
#53Interestingly, no mention of WTL
Ahah, I knew I missed one!
I originally had ATL in there, but my proofreading squad (Claude and ChatGPT) told me that ATL was a more niche thing for COM, and looking at the Wikipedia article I was convinced they were right.
But WTL was what I was thinking of---the step between the MFC and .NET that I forgot.
Re: Windows native app development is a mess
#54That is why everyone even Microsoft themselves does Electron. Running with html/css/js has benefits it really is open and free development based on international standards and not locked into any single big tech.
NPM it's the bigger turd happened ever, slow and bloated. And JS today amounts the biggest enforced propietary loading method of existence in almost every web page.
Open? You wish.
>and not locked into any single big tech.
DRM and propietary cody tells me otherwise.
Re: Windows native app development is a mess
#55Best framework for this is Qt.
And Lazarus/FPC.
Re: Windows native app development is a mess
#56> And from what I can tell, neither are most developers. The Hacker News commentariat loves to bemoan the death of native apps. But given what a mess the Windows app platform is, I’ll pick the web stack any day, with Electron or Tauri to bridge down to the relevant Win32 APIs for OS integration. Well yes as a user I prefer native apps for their performance. It's clearly a mess to develop native apps as the article sh…
When Microsoft themselves use electron to develop apps what expectations can we have on other devs?
Re: Windows native app development is a mess
#57Earlier quoted context omitted.
Winforms is great until you try to make windows dynamically sized, or deal with DPI nicely. In every other regard it's still fine, and for accessibility actually _better_ than many subsequent frameworks. And produces nice small fast executables.
I assume that if Microsoft hadn't abandoned WinForms for the next thing, it would support dynamic sizing and DPI properly. It's mindboggling how much time and effort they've wasted coming up with new GUI frameworks instead of just improving on what they have.
[deleted]
Re: Windows native app development is a mess
#58I'm an embedded programmer who occassionally needs to write various windows programs to interface with embedded devices (usually via serial port or usb), and I find it a breeze to write native gui programs in pure win32 and c++. Recently had to add a new feature to and old program that was last updated in the XP era and two things to note: 1. The program did not need to be updated to run on Vista, 7, 10 and 11, shit…
Honestly, your GUIs are too simple to be part of this conversation. Try writing something like Spotify in WinAPI and that's not even a complicated GUI either.
Re: Windows native app development is a mess
#59This is quite timely as we need to write a simple UI for Windows (a few buttons, status, maybe a file menu). The main constraint is it must compile to a single binary (.exe) with no dependencies such as runtimes, DLLs, languages etc. It also needs to run on some older unsupported Windows systems, probably Windows >= 7, 32 bit.
My first thought was MFC. Basic, fast, well understood.
But then maybe WxWindows so we can cross-compile it (from Linux) and use the same UI on other platforms? It could probably be compiled statically although I've not tested it.
Or Mono, but that needs a runtime?
Edit: Some comments mention Qt which could also work although how large is the runtime? Can it be compiled statically?
Re: Windows native app development is a mess
#60Best framework for this is Qt.
I've recently discovered FLTK: https://www.fltk.org/doc-1.4/intro.html
Haven't used Qt in a while, but at first glance, seems simpler: https://github.com/fltk/fltk/blob/master/examples/menubar-ad...