wil VS SDL

Even then, MFC and C++/CX were the only productive ways to use it from Microsoft SDKs.

.NET isn't as convenient as VB 6 was, fully embracing COM as the VBX replacement model, technically introduced in VB5, but still some stuff was lacking.

Then there is Delphi and C++ Builder.

It beat me that having doubled down on COM since how Longhorn went down, and Windows team getting their way doing avoiding .NET to take over, they hardly managed to create nice tooling as the competition.

Editing IDL files with a Notepad like experience, manually merging generated code, and a couple of frameworks that barely go beyond yet another way to do AddRef/Release/QueryInterface and aggregation.

Meanwhile D-BUS, XPC and AIDL, provide much better dev experience.

Pity that Borland products are kind of tainted due to mismanagement decisions, otherwise maybe fixing COM dev experience would already been seriously taken by VS team.

Ah, nowadays WIL is probably the best approach when having only to consume COM.

https://github.com/microsoft/wil

Have a look at WIL for a C++ library used by Microsoft themselves, including kernel development.

I'm digging for more information and it looks like Microsoft's created a way to handle the problems I'm trying to address with this: https://github.com/Microsoft/wil/wiki/RAII-resource-wrappers

Since we are on this subject, those that need a nice C++ library to deal with COM in VC++, are better served with WIL.

Not since Vista.

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/cpp/build/reference/kernel-...

> Creates a binary that can be executed in the Windows kernel. The code in the current project gets compiled and linked by using a simplified set of C++ language features that are specific to code that runs in kernel mode.

And then there is WIL, https://github.com/microsoft/wil

https://community.osr.com/discussion/291326/the-new-wil-libr...

> First off, let me point out that this library is used to implement large parts of the OS. There are hundreds of developers here who use it. So unlike, uh, some other things that get tossed onto github, this project is not likely to wither and die tomorrow.

> There are, however, only a handful of kernel developers working on the library, so the kernel support has been coming along much slower. I'd like to expand the existing kernel features in depth ....

> Plus C++ standard library can't be used anyway and auto pointers aren't really that much of a concern at the kernel level

https://github.com/microsoft/wil

"Ah, but that isn't used on the Windows kernel" would be the expected reply, well

https://community.osr.com/discussion/291326/the-new-wil-libr...

"Microsoft's toolchain does not ship a copy of the STL that works in kernel mode. Partly this is because the kernel's CRT doesn't support C++ exceptions. (And partly this is because I/O is wildly different in kernel, so you'd have to rewrite the implementation of all the I/O libraries.)

But for kernel developers, wil ships a subset of an STL implementation. To avoid conflicting with the real STL, it's available under the wistd namespace. The rule of thumb is that wistd::foo is a drop-in replacement for std::foo."

Windows is a mix of legacy C code, which started to be migrated into C++ around the Vista time (hence /kernel in VC++) and .NET/COM (WinRT is basically COM with some extras).

Modern kernel code makes use of WIL.

https://github.com/microsoft/wil

Wayland works well on the Steam Deck because Valve controls the whole system. Because they have their own Wayland compositor (Gamescope), they're able to implement protocols to work around issues in Wayland without being delayed by the bureaucratic process of getting them approved. Here's an SDL pull request where a graphics developer at Valve discusses how two protocols necessary for good GPU performance haven't been added to Wayland yet so Valve added equivalent protocols to Gamescope as a workaround: https://github.com/libsdl-org/SDL/pull/9345

One thing to note is that the Steam Deck only uses Wayland for its fullscreen gaming mode. When you exit to its desktop mode (meant for running non-Steam software), it switches to X11.

The linked project doesn't use any ObjC files at all. SDL2 has a bunch of Cocoa files[1] so you did use Cocoa even if unknowingly.

[1] https://github.com/libsdl-org/SDL/tree/main/src/video/cocoa

Correct. It's explained here:

https://github.com/libsdl-org/SDL/pull/9345#issuecomment-201...

XWayland has special hooks into the compositors that normal wayland clients don't get.

Found about this through the release of SDL 3: https://github.com/libsdl-org/SDL/blob/main/build-scripts/SD...

https://github.com/libsdl-org/SDL/blob/main/include/SDL3/SDL_events.h

If that app ran in a 640x480 mode, memory accesses would be just as fast as the VGA applications 25 years ago, correct?

I think there's a lot more going on than that. Here's SDL's current pixel access code:

https://github.com/libsdl-org/SDL/blob/main/src/video/SDL_su...

We use the code examples throughout the article. The ellipsis characters "...." in the code were added by the author of the article. You can find the source files on the official GitHub of libsdl. In addition, each fragment has a reference to a specific area in the code. By the time this article is published, many errors will have already been fixed thanks to the issues we opened (for example, here and there). However, the links in the examples point exactly to the code you see in this article. Not only do we enjoy teasing developers but we also like making their projects a little bit better!

FetchContent_Declare(SDL2 GIT_REPOSITORY https://github.com/libsdl-org/SDL.git GIT_TAG release-2.28.3 ) FetchContent_MakeAvailable(SDL2)

It's not that difficult, I recently started learning to use graphics APIs myself. OpenGL is for linux, etc., directx for windows and vulkan for all platforms. I read through a bunch of forums yesterday and decided to go for vulkan (here is a link to the sdk) for my next small projects because it can run on all platforms. I would recommend to watch a basic tutorial series (like this one) for the graphics api itself to get an understanding of whats going on. And on top of that I use SDL2 for eventhandling and ImGui for the graphical user interface. Here is a link to a guide for setting up vulkan on your platform in case you would go for it.