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by pjmlp 4 days ago
I would approach anything windows-rs with care, the team is the one responsible for killing C++/CX in name of C++/WinRT, and then leaving it half baked to go play with Rust and windows-rs.

Nothing they said on stage at CppCon 2017 came to fruition.

You're better off doing the UI in WPF and calling into Rust DLLs.
1 comments
OptionOfT 4 days ago
Makes sense, Microsoft doesn't have the best track record in supporting frameworks.

I myself have never worked with C++/CX or C++/WinRT. My Rust journey has been exclusively on POSIX systems, so seeing windows-reactor and getting a UI in a couple of lines is pretty cool.

I would never (at least not in its current state) recommend it for production though, as the crate containing reactor isn't even on crates.io.

Could you share some of the promises made that were abandoned? (I just realized that question sounds like AI... I promise you it's not).

link
pjmlp 4 days ago
Easy, that is the beauty of recordings,

You can start by when C++/CX was replaced,

CppCon 2016: “Embracing Standard C++ for the Windows Runtime"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lm4IwfiJ3EU

With the followup talk the year thereafter,

CppCon 2017: “C++/WinRT and the Future of C++ on Windows”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7TdpWB_vRZM

Except the Visual Studio tooling comparable to C++/CX never came to be, using C++/WinRT feels to this day like using ATL with Visual C++ 6.0, except

"This isn't meant as a negative statement. cppwinrt has reached all of its goals and is generally considered complete and largely bug-free (1). Whether WinRT/WinUI/WinAppSDK is the future is debatable. My experience has shown me that the Windows operating system is at its best when you embrace the Windows API as a whole, including Win32/COM/WinRT, and not just the latest shiny wave. You can see this in action with the popularity of projects like win32metadata and windows-rs that support both WinRT and non-WinRT APIs seamlessly."

From https://github.com/microsoft/cppwinrt/issues/1289#issuecomme...

You will notice the open issues are mostly bug fixes.

So who knows what will even happen to windows-rs crate.

link