[rbanffy]

I really, really, am baffled at how difficult it seems to have a GUI builder tool that outputs a description of the UI that a program can just load (or a compiler transform into a structure inside the program) as objects the program can use, handling events and pushing presentation information into it.

That was pretty much what VB did, with immense success.

[badsectoracula]

The problem is that you need some form of RTTI that allows object serialization. This is basically what Delphi does: the forms, controls, etc you are editing are not fake stand-ins, they are the class instances you are working with. The object inspector shows you the actual instance properties as defined in code and you are editing live objects - the only difference is that those objects have a "design mode" flag so they can ignore any user input. When you save a form, it serializes the objects on disk. That serialization data is stored on the executable and when you run the program, the form is deserialized and the object instances are what were stored.

There is almost no UI-specific functionality there, the same functionality can be used to serialize any type of object and you can even implement your own serialization logic for your objects. The language's RTII allows for declaring properties (think like C# properties, though really C# properties were inspired by Delphi properties as the latter had them since the original Delphi 1.0 for Windows 3.1) as part of a class and has support for metaclasses (classes are instances themselves of a metaclass that describes the class), including virtual constructors (since classes are instances they have their own VMT) which allows for constructing class instances on the fly by passing a class type in a function.

The thing is, C++ does not have this sort of functionality. You can implement your own RTTI, as several projects do (many game engines do that for example), but it is often clunky (e.g. relies on macros, duplicating info, manual registration and/or external tools that parse the code and generate the RTTI boilerplate).

C++ Builder did it because it extended C++ to add that functionality in a way that is ABI compatible with Delphi - and is how it can use VCL (which is written in Delphi).

[dleslie]

It was easy to do in Win95 through to Win2k because the interface was consistent throughout. Then they started changing the interface guidelines, and toolkit, for every major release of windows; and sometimes several times during the life of a major release.

[rbanffy]

This is also baffling. A button, a text input, a checkbox, a drop list, a combo - they all have a "default" look in every Windows version since 2.0 (1 didn't have the drop list, IIRC). It shouldn't be difficult to make an abstract description of a dialog box look at home with a new version of the OS and, yet, digging through Windows 10's built-in apps you sometimes find things that you recognize as skinned versions of Windows NT 4 dialogs. That they look like NT 4 dialogs with the Windows 7 skin applied is disconcerting, at best.

[wolpoli]

The Office team used to pioneer (hard-code) the look and feel for the UI, and then the Windows team goes and implement the look and feel system wide in a generic way. Then somewhere along the way, the Windows team decided to hard-code the look and feel that you could now do an archeological dig through decades of UI.

[rbanffy]

I find it revolting that it is hardcoded this way. A button should look like a button.