cppwinrt VS CPM.cmake

Cppwinrt is in maintenance mode[1]. Cppwin32 is abandoned (with windows.h as the official alternative). It is now possible to deploy WinUI 3 apps as single files in C#[2] but not in C++. From experience, the entire C++ side of WinUI 3 documentation is underbaked to the extent that the easiest road is to read the C# documentation and attempt to guess the cppwinrt equivalent (as docs for cppwinrt are not really... there).

I don’t know if they’ve really abandoned C++ entirely—the compiler team certainly hasn’t, that’s true. But the above doesn’t feel like first-class support.

[1] https://github.com/microsoft/cppwinrt/issues/1289#issuecomme...

[2] https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/core/deploying/sing...

https://github.com/microsoft/cppwinrt/

And then compare with Project Reunion vision from 2021, and where we are three years later

https://blogs.windows.com/windowsdeveloper/2021/03/29/announ...

Mainly because along the way, as if those changes weren't enough, they also decided to reboot their initial approach with Project Reunion, WinAppSDK took another route, and here we are.

This is only a short overview of how WinRT went down since Windows 8, thus only those that never advocated for it, can honestly suggest WinUI, as they lack the background of how chaotic it all is.

[0] - https://devblogs.microsoft.com/cppblog/announcing-hilo/

Windows Runtime (WinRT) seems to be something they are working on. From what I could read are there a bunch of stuff needed apart from just a development library. I guess you meant this: https://github.com/microsoft/cppwinrt

Yeah, I closed it because it didn't seem to be taken into consideration, as later proven by https://github.com/microsoft/cppwinrt/issues/1123

I also don't understand the CMake hate. Modern CMake (3.14+) is just around 10 lines to build basic sources/libraries/executables. And you can either use CMake FetchContent or use CPM https://github.com/cpm-cmake/CPM.cmake to fetch dependencies. No third-party tool like vcpkg or conan is needed.

Have you taken a look at CPM ? https://github.com/cpm-cmake/CPM.cmake . It makes CMake project management easy - no need for separate package manager tool.

I like to pin GitHub dependencies using a commit hash, instead of a tag. You need a recent CPM.cmake file in your project for CPM to work.

C++20 brings std::format, improving C++ developer experience for formatting strings. If you have to use older standards, though, add fmtlib to your repo. It plays well with CMake and you can use CPM to add fmtlib to your project. The library supports many Rust format macro features, and makes code far cleaner when you need to do string interpolation with variables.

This is true for almost all projects but things are getting better. I use CPM for a couple of years now and get the experience desired

https://github.com/cpm-cmake/CPM.cmake

Yes, i found vcpkg terrible and FetchContent usually works way better. An amazing project is https://github.com/cpm-cmake/CPM.cmake, which automates FetchContent and makes dependencies mostly hassle free.

There's two completely different aspects to your question. 1) How to manage libraries in c++ without dying from cringe? I'd suggest you use cmake as the build system and grab library sources directly from GitHub using this tool: https://github.com/cpm-cmake/CPM.cmake 2) How to get apps that run under WSL to display windows-native windows? I'm not sure, but it's probably this: https://github.com/microsoft/wslg

I personally like to use something called CPMCmake for smaller personal projects, just because it has 0 requirements on the person that wants to use your project, they don't have to setup anything on their end, the only requirement is to have Cmake.

I personally would thoroughly recommend CPM. It's a CMake plugin which you install as a script in your CMake project and you can then use its function CPMFindPackage(), which basically wraps find_package() and ExternalProject() to use the former if the package is installed on the machine, or downloads it and builds it in-tree using the latter if not.

At first, I wanted to install it using Vcpkg but I ended up using CPM.cmake instead. Why? Because with Vcpkg on some platform it is messing up the config and choose a version of Python used in Vcpkg instead of the one I wanted to use. It is not that hard to fix, but why bother when I can install the library in one line with CPM.cmake