[pjmlp]

Yes, and it grew out of Object Windows Library, which also add extensions, and was definitly much more pleasant to use than MFC has ever managed to.

No need for the past tense, both products are still on the market with frequent releases and developer conferences, even if no longer at the same adoption level.

[int_19h]

I remember OWL being somewhat weird in that it rendered quite a few stock controls itself, in ways that made OWL apps really stick out on Win 3.11.

MFC gets a lot of flak, but I think that a large chunk of it is undeserved because it's a fundamentally different kind of framework - a wrapper that tries to streamline the use of underlying APIs without concealing their fundamental nature, whereas OWL and VCL (and VB6, and WinForms) are higher-level wrappers that do quite a lot for you even when they use native widgets under the hood. From that perspective, if anything, the more appropriate criticism of MFC is that it tries to do too much - e.g. that whole document/view thing is clearly a high-level abstraction that always felt out of place to me given the overall design of the framework. WTL is basically what MFC tried to be but failed.

[pjmlp]

That was optional, it just turned out too many people liked to enable custom rendering.

That is exactly the reason why many of us dislike MFC, its low level wrapping of Windows APIs.

With OWL you could already have a kind of C# like experience, but in Windows 3.x, that is how far ahead the experience was versus MFC.

This is the tragedy of C++ frameworks, the tooling could be as good as VB, Delphi, Java, .NET, but then we have a big chunk of developers that insist in pushing for low level Cisms instead.

Honestly I never see much uptake on WTL, especially because dealing with ATL was already bad enough.

From the outside it feels like the chain of command at Microsoft has some big issue with producing great GUI development experiences for C++ developers.

When they finally nailed it, having a C++ Builder like experience, it was killed in the name of extensions by a rebel group, that nowadays is having fun writing Rust bindings for Windows APIs.