cppwinrt

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 approach 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...

Supposedly is being worked on for making it more Native AOT friendly. How we got into this mess? WinDev and DevDiv politcs. After the Longhorn debacle, its technologies landed on DevDiv, like WCF and WPF. Sinofsky and friends never were that keen in having .NET coming into their turf, it is no surprise that Hilo sample for Windows 7, then praises COM and C++ for Windows applications[0][1]. Then coming in this path, WinRT came to be, with roots as how .NET was being designed, before Microsoft decided to pivot it as another Java like technology[2]. A bunch of folks in WinDev, weren't happy with C++/CX, so they united to replace it with C++/WinRT, because extensions, when clang and GCC are full of extensions, promised to give back a C++/CX like developer experience in 2017[3], never delivered, went to have fun with Rust/WinRT. Now C++/WinRT

They wrote a Swift language projection for WinRT, akin to Microsoft's projections for standard C++ and Rust. https://github.com/thebrowsercompany/swift-winrt https://github.com/microsoft/cppwinrt https://github.com/microsoft/windows-rs