rust-plugin-system VS windows-rs

There's the abi_stable crate, which provides safe ffi between shared libraries and applications, I also made a simple example (only using the libloading crate), it's as fast as it can be, since there's no extra overhead, but it's not ffi safe and a small change in any of the vtables (traits) can cause segfaults (you can add a version check though)

It's a shame that, unlike with Win32, using WinUI places pretty harsh restrictions on which programming languages and environments you can use. Only C# and C++ are supported, the latter only with Microsoft compilers. For everything else, including Rust[1], Python and MinGW C/C++, there is no answer for OP's question, and the effect of this on the visual consistency of the Windows desktop is obvious - there is none. Every third-party app uses a different toolkit with a different look and feel, because the library providing the standard look and feel simply isn't available to the majority of developers.

[1]: https://github.com/microsoft/windows-rs/pull/1836

On Windows you'd need to call the LoadLibraryEx method. You'd also need a crate to call Win32 functions, I suggest windows-rs.

windows-rs, Microsoft's crate wrapping the Windows API, already includes the WDK, the special sdk for creating kernel code.

> already has the WDK for a while

I would interpret "for a while" as more than ~7 weeks.

Version 0.46 added initial WDK support: https://github.com/microsoft/windows-rs/releases/tag/0.46.0

On windows, I'll probably use https://github.com/gabdube/native-windows-gui or https://github.com/microsoft/windows-rs both of them seem pretty solid.

Microsoft offers official "bindings" to Win32 APIs through win32metadata. However, until recently, it did not include metadata for kernel-level functions or WDK. In early 2021, an issue was raised through windows-rs regarding this limitation, but progress was slow until now. Microsoft has finally released official metadata for WDK, which can be found on the wdkmetadata repository. The latest comment on the issue thread can be found here:

Is something wrong with https://github.com/deviceplug/btleplug or you haven't found it? You could also use bindings to platform libraries like https://github.com/microsoft/windows-rs and https://github.com/rust-mobile/ndk if btleplug doesn't have something fundamental to you.

Regarding the issue of HINSTANCE and SOCKET, it's been discussed on https://github.com/microsoft/windows-rs/issues/1643 but there haven't seem to be a conclusion. Also, I believe windows-sys intentionally does not provide any type safety -- the higher level windows crate does wrap the handles into something that you cannot do arithmetic on.