I am 17 and I wasn't wearing my glasses and I was really speaking winamp until I read your comment then scrolled back again to realize it was winapp

My bet is that I spend time on HN so I knew what winamp is in more detail but if say friends my age read it & say they use tiktok more, I would say that they wouldn't call it winamp but winapp

So I guess I might be one of the few exceptions but I feel like people on HN are much more likely to read it as winamp than not & age might not be thaaat big of an impact (atleast on HN)

I reckon that the majority of the HN audience is into older (perhaps more graceful) working technology despite all the fanfare that newer, shinier stuff garners.

Seems Llamas will disappear as quickly as they became trendy.

I've moved on, but this looks like it will at least fix some of the paper cuts.

I'm a big fan of the MFC/WinForms era stuff myself, but it has one crippling limitation: it doesn't handle display scaling very well at all.

Plain Win32 needs a renaissance. I worked with it and felt like a wizard. Message boxes, dialogue boxes, wizards, hammered out in pure C++. Combined with the Windows Implementation Library[1] I was writing fast, modern code.

[1]: https://github.com/microsoft/wil

I switched from someone that was kind found of WinRT, as what .NET 1.0 should have been, AOT compiled languages built on top of COM, improving the VB 6 experience, to someone burned out with the experience, back into Web development and distributed systems.

However, Microsoft keeps talking as if everything was tiptop, and that angers me thus I keep track of how bad things still are, and spend time making others aware of the false promises.

For example, I bet no one is aware that C++/WinRT is actually in maintenance, and the team responsible for killing C++/CX, is now having fun with Rust on windows-rs.

Yet Microsoft talks about using C++ to develop WinUI applications, as if the tooling was at the same level as using C++ Builder or Qt/QtBuilder.

Programming Windows, by Charles Petzold

Programming Windows with MFC, by Jeff Prosise

COM / DCOM Primer Plus, by Chris Corry Vincent Mayfield John Cadman

The Web versions also consume C++ via WebAssembly, the mobile versions are a mix of the platform languages + C++.

There are some CppCon talks about how they use C++ in Office.

It could be worse—it could be Linux, with no forward compatibility. The VC/C++ redistributable means that applications can be written on modern Windows that targets much older Windows, by simply providing a sidecar installer that brings with it a newer C/C++ standard library. This situation is basically impossible on Linux without messing with Docker.

I thought they had solved the worst problem with WinUI2, a bit like the compatibility library in Android, so you only had to bundle the more "volatile" bits while still delegating most things to the OS.

But then they went and threw all that out the windows (pun intended) with WinUI3 which even has its own separate implementation of DirectWrite for some god forsaken reason.

Unlike the DirectX redistributables of old it's not even backwards compatible so you can't tell people "just download the WinAppSDK runtime", they have to install the specific version you used when developing your app.

You get that download "for free" if you use a .appx, but with a regular installer you're on your own. Even the way apps link to the WindowsAppSDK is a mess with a weird bootstrapping process.

Not worth the headache.