winsafe VS win32metadata

I know all that shit because I'm the author of Rust's WinSafe library, which is a safer Rust layer over native Win32, so I had to deal with a lot of shit like this.

[dependencies] winsafe = { git = "https://github.com/rodrigocfd/winsafe", features = ["kernel"] }

Externally, you can write a lot of native Windows stuff in Rust already. Personally, I'm having a lot of fun with WinSafe.

If you had such problems (which I also had in the past), I'm really interested in you opinion about WinSafe, and if it could help you solving them.

If you're after a native Windows application, WinSafe may suit your needs.

As the author of WinSafe, I can say it's tedious sometimes, but it's often very challenging, because you have to translate crazy unsafe behaviors into Rust's ownership model. It's surely hard, but also very rewarding at the end.

As the author of the WinSafe lib, I wholeheartedly agree.

I don't know how rare this is (or how rare it should be), but this issue warned me about this potential problem, and I had to make a huge refactoring to treat the possibility. I had to rethink many aspects of all handle implementations. It was hard work, but in the end it was worth it.

WinSafe says hello.

WinSafe, for example (which attemps to be a safe layer over the Windows API), provides lots of RAII automations. A fine example is the BeginPaint function:

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