win32metadata VS ProjectReunion

As /u/huellenoperator notes, that this needs a pointer to a mutable string comes straight from microsoft through win32metadata. Maybe it's a mistake on Microsoft's side, but if it's not you're taking big risks.

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:

for win32metadata's kernel api tracking issue, https://github.com/microsoft/win32metadata/issues/401

Any examples? Since the API bindings in windows-sys are generated from the metadata generated from official Windows SDK headers I'd not expect to see this kind of difference.

You might also look at this project: https://github.com/microsoft/win32metadata

There is still the occasional incredibly subtle link time fuckery in Rust.

https://github.com/microsoft/win32metadata/issues/1274

"Minor" semver updates to crates breaking things via e.g. unexpected MSRV bumps is pretty common too, with some resulting bitrot. That said, I agree with you that things in Rust are at least better. Imperfect, but better.

Win32 is available as metadata to enable adoption in as many languages as possible. Are there some things missing? Yes. The Microsoft team acknowledges that and encourages asking for the things you need so they can add them to the metadata.

It might be interesting to have bindings generated for the entirety of Win32 API through https://github.com/microsoft/win32metadata

Hi JB! Funny to cross paths with you in this context. I don't know if you remember me but I was a rookie programmer who got the pleasure of joining the VideoLan Conference in Dublin back in 2014, and then Paris the next year, and you were very kind to me.

The GitHub issue title here is unfortunately misleading. I have renamed it to "ideas to improve windows header files and libc". Also, I hope it is clear that I rebutted the points made by the OP, because I completely agree with your summary that the mingw-w64 people are skilled, nice and very clever and think about all use cases.

If any drive-by HN readers work at Microsoft, please help us with this issue: https://github.com/microsoft/win32metadata/issues/766

The issue is described here: WebView2 does not support passing in a CoreWebView2Environment · Issue #1170 · microsoft/WindowsAppSDK (github.com)

.. and how many of the Microsoft applications actually use WinUI3? As far as I can tell they're doing their own thing (Office) or are Electron (Teams) or, at least in Windows 10, haven't actually been updated from WinForms.

The overhead of WinUI3 is pretty huge. The visual designer, a winning feature of Visual Studio for decades, is AWOL. Why? It's XAML, the same as the previous XAML designer! It's just .. broken?

The backward compatibility story is a disaster: you can get stuck in the UWP sandbox https://github.com/microsoft/WindowsAppSDK/issues/1780

What's the big Microsoft WinUI3 flagship app, then? Something people are actually using? Rather than just a few system dialogues. (How many Win11 settings pop up a Win32 dialogue box, still?)

Development for WinAppSdk and WinUI 3 is also very slow and Microsoft seems to not want to push it and invest more developers into it for some reason. They try to improve the framework, is just it's a small team. For example it was a headacke to apply the Mica backgrop and required unmanaged code, they made it simpler and reduced it to a line of code but it took months. I have 2 out of 7 issues fixed on WinAppSdk repository and 0 out of 8 issues fixed in the WinUI 3 repository (some of the older than a year). This are just my issues, there are many other opened by other developers. So yeah, it wasn't fun at all. PoweshellSDK had an issue with the Import-Module command and it wasn't fixed for more than a year and probably won't be ever fixed, but I'm glad I found a workaround, even more clean and more safe, otherwise I couldn't have added the posibility to uninstall and change Store apps.

As far as I know, there are still some issues with OIDC integration. See this, for example.

this I'm interested in. WinAppSDK is open source.

I think the issue is actually the sandboxing and other stuff. WinRT StorageProvider API is known to be extremely slow and NTFS / Windows IO subsystem is itself already quite slow compared to UNIX. The issue IIRC is that StorageProvider is designed for sandboxing and the way they implemented that involves doing RPCs to other processes. So there's probably some heavy context switching involved, but it's architectural, and so the voice recorder was never fixed.

https://github.com/microsoft/WindowsAppSDK/issues/8

Disclaimer: I work for Microsoft. I even work on WindowsAppSDK just not the WinUI parts. People far more graphically inclined and talented than I handle that 😀