STL VS cppwin32

Again, they are barely functional.

MSVC chokes on many standard-defined constructs: https://github.com/microsoft/STL/issues/1694

clang does not claim to be "mostly usable" at all - most papers are not implemented: https://clang.llvm.org/cxx_status.html#cxx20

And gcc will only start ot be usable with CMake when version 14 is released - that has not happened yet.

And, as I mentioned before, IDE support is either buggy (Visual Studio) or non-existing (any other IDE/OS). So you're off to writing in a text editor and hoping your compiler works to a somewhat usable degree. Yes, at some point people should start using modules, I agree, but to advise library maintainers to ship modularized code... the tooling just isn't there yet.

I mean, the GitHub issue is Microsoft trying to ship their standard library modularized, they employ some of the most capable folks on the planet and pay them big money to get that done, while metaphorically sitting next to the Microsoft compiler devs, and they barely, barely get it done (with bugs, as they themselves mention). This is too much for most other library maintainers.

Notice that there are in practice three distinct implementations of the C++ standard library. They're all awful to read though, here's Microsoft's std::vector https://github.com/microsoft/STL/blob/main/stl/inc/vector

However you're being slightly unfair because Rust's Vec is just defined (opaquely) as a RawVec plus a length value, so let's link RawVec, https://doc.rust-lang.org/src/alloc/raw_vec.rs.html -- RawVec is the part responsible for the messy problem of how to actually implement the growable array type.

Still, the existence of three C++ libraries with slightly different (or sometimes hugely different) quality of implementation means good C++ code can't depend on much beyond what the ISO document promises, and yet it must guard against the nonsense inflicted by all three and by lacks of the larger language. In particular everything must use the reserved prefix so that it's not smashed inadvertently by a macro, and lots of weird C++ idioms that preserve performance by sacrificing clarity of implementation are needed, even where you'd ordinarily sacrifice to get the development throughput win of everybody know what's going on. For example you'll see a lot of "pair" types bought into existence which are there to squirrel away a ZST that in C++ can't exist, using the Empty Base Optimisation. In Rust the language has ZSTs so they can just write what they meant.

Here is Microsoft's implementation of map in the standard library. I think of myself as a competent programmer / computer scientist. I couldn't write this: https://github.com/microsoft/STL/blob/f392449fb72d1a387ac502...

Be careful on Windows, the MSVC STL implementation uses the system time, so it can be badly impacted by clock adjustments: https://github.com/microsoft/STL/issues/718

Can you provide a link? If it affects import std;, I'd like to add it to my tracking issue.

Do you have a list of the bugs you've filed and their current status, like the one I have for the STL? I saw you mentioned 3 bugs 7 months ago, 2 of which were fixed in 17.6 and the third of which was a duplicate of an active bug ("deducing this" is known to not yet work with modules, which is why we don't define the feature-test macro to claim full support).

Yep. And look at our implementation's name: https://github.com/microsoft/STL

I would imagine something like https://github.com/microsoft/cppwin32 would maybe be an easier way forward for that?

no, Microsoft has rewritten the windows API in C++ I think https://github.com/microsoft/cppwin32

An official work in progress Windows binding, still far behind of what C# existing bindings are capable of, or legacy toolkits like MFC.

Also given how the team has managed C++/CX transition to C++/WinRT with lesser tooling stuck on C++17, dropped Modern C++ bindings [0][1], before going into other shinny thing, I wonder how long they will keep at it.

[0] - https://blogs.windows.com/windowsdeveloper/2021/01/21/making...

[1] - https://github.com/microsoft/cppwin32

If you want to use the old tooling, your C++ is going to be very "C with classes," and it's going to use a lot of weird datatypes that don't feel very C++ at all. Microsoft had a project for wrapping the Windows API in idiomatic C++, but appear to have abandoned it. If you choose to go down this road, Charles Petzold's Programming Windows is the book to get. Yes, it's 25 years old, but all the new stuff is just new COM controls (which you can look up in the API documentation)--the fundamentals of making a Windows API program work seriously have not changed.

Even Rust has a native projection of the windows API (which is actually pretty usable). This projection has the same roots as the C++ projection mentioned by u/amnesiac0x07C5. So I don't believe macros are a blocker here.

See : https://github.com/microsoft/cppwin32

Microsoft have recently put decent effort into making the Windows APIs more accessible to C++ users. One of these efforts is called C++/WinRT, and it specifically targets applications intended for "modern" Windows (Windows 8 and later). There's another effort underway at Microsoft for making the older Win32 API more C++-friendly, but it isn't documented nearly as well.

There is a similar project for C++, but it sadly seems to be dead already. The last commit was one year ago.

not that hard to wrap windows.h and undef the annoying stuff, and only a handful of files in your codebase will include it anyway. on the other hand stuff like this looks extremely worse and exactly like the kind of c++ that is hard banned in gamedev codebases

They are, actually, it's linked from the article: https://github.com/microsoft/cppwin32