DEdelta_p_delta_x·Jun 14, 2026
Use Windows Implementation Library to clean things up and get some RAII on handle types: https://github.com/microsoft/wil
In Windows 1.0 and the WinAPI, 40 Years Latermicrosoft
wil
C++2019–2026
microsoft / wil
wil
Windows Implementation Library
10Distinct people
26Mentions
0Explicit recommenders
3KGitHub stars
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Windows Implementation Library
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This week on Hacker News
Nov 7–Nov 14 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/14/2026, 1:49:46 PM UTC.
No direct repository links were found in the indexed HN discussions over the past seven days. Older discussions are available below.
Mentions over time
HN mentions by year26 dated mentions
Observed mentions: 2019-05-09 00:15:35 UTC to 2026-06-14 14:36:13 UTC.
* An incomplete calendar period is marked with an outlined bar. Its count is not directly comparable with a full period.
Counts come from the repository’s dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.
View mention counts and date ranges
| Period | Start (UTC) | End (exclusive, UTC) | Mentions | Submissions | Comments |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2019 | 2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 4 | 2 | 2 |
| 2020 | 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 2021 | 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 6 | 1 | 5 |
| 2022 | 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 3 | 0 | 3 |
| 2023 | 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 2024 | 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 3 | 0 | 3 |
| 2025 | 2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 4 | 0 | 4 |
| 2026 (partial) | 2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2027-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 6 | 1 | 5 |
What Hacker News says
26 sourcesThe blogger and the blog says:
> BTW: As a nice addition, if you use SAL annotations
> Windows C++ Programming
Not everyone will see the irony, but the Windows user-mode application and library suite and the kernel now very heavily rely on the safety mechanisms of C++ that the author calls 'complex', 'uglif[ied]', and has 'los[t] the taste for good readable code'. I'm of course referring to the Windows Implementation Library: https://github.com/microsoft/wil This is explicitly an effort from MS WinDev to make Windows C++ code safer. User-mode applications writing native Windows code can and absolutely should use it, too.
Any time I see `void*` in C++ I ring-fence it as a C-ism and make sure I `reinterpret_cast`. For me, a bag of bytes is `std::span<std::byte>`. void* is a memory location with no provenance, no ownership, no size informati
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on, nothing. Do I even know if it is this program's memory, or some shared memory construct, or maybe even a pointer into GPU memory? No for all.
C likes to play fast and loose and its proponents call it 'beautiful and simple', I call it a segfault/use-after-free/double-free waiting to happen.
Microsoft/Wil: Windows Implementation Library
3 points · Open discussionNo one should use any of these weird Frankenstein monstrosities in 2026. And a batch script? :( PowerShell exists.
Install:
- contrary to the blog post, the entirety of Visual Studio, because the IDE and debugger is *really damn good*.
- LLVM-MinGW[1]
Load the 'VSDevShell' DLL[2] for PowerShell, and you're good to go, with three different toolchains now:
cl.exe from VS
clang-cl.exe—you don't need to install this separately in VS; just use the above-mentioned llvm-mingw clang.exe as `clang.exe --driver=cl /winsysroot <path\to\Windows SDK> /vctoolsdir <path\to\VC>`. Or you can use it in GNU-driver-style mode, and use -Xmicrosoft-windows-sys-root. This causes it to target the Windows ABI and links against the VS SDK/VC tools
`clang.exe` that targets the Itanium ABI and links against the MinGW libraries and LLVM libc++.
Done and
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dusted. Load these into a CMake toolchain and never look at them again.
People really like overcomplicating their lives.
At the same time, learn the drawbacks of all toolchains and use what is appropriate for your needs. If you want to write Windows drivers, then forget about anything non-MSVC (unless you really want to do things the hard way for the hell of it). link.exe is slow as molasses, but can do incremental linking natively. cl.exe's code gen is (sometimes) slightly worse than Clang's. The MinGW ABI does not understand things like SAL annotations[3], and this breaks very useful libraries like WIL[4] (or libraries built on top of them, like the Azure C++ SDK[5] The MinGW headers sometimes straight up miss newer features that the Windows SDK comes with, like cfapi.h[6].
[1]: https://github.com/mstorsjo/llvm-mingw
[2]: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-gb/visualstudio/ide/reference...
[3]: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-gb/cpp/c-runtime-library/sal-...
[4]: https://github.com/microsoft/wil
[5]: https://github.com/Azure/azure-sdk-for-cpp
[6]: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-gb/windows/win32/cfapi/build-...
There are some pretty useful abstractions and libraries that MinGW doesn't work with. Biggest example is the WIL[1], which Windows kernel programmers use and is a massive improvement in ergonomics and safety when writing native Windows platform code.
[1]: https://github.com/microsoft/wil
In I fixed Windows native development> plain Win32
Plain Win32 needs a renaissance. I worked with it and felt like a wizard. Message boxes, dialogue boxes, wizards, hammered out in pure C++. Combined with the Windows Implementation Library[1] I was writing fast, modern code.
[1]: https://github.com/microsoft/wil
In Winapp, the Windows App Development CLIAnything related to WinUI is a bad joke.
Have fun following the discussions and amount of bugs,
https://github.com/microsoft/microsoft-ui-xaml
That C++ support that WinUI team marketing keeps talking about relies on a framework that is no longer being developed.
> The reason the issues page only lets you create a bug report is because cppwinrt is in maintenance mode and no longer receiving new feature work. cppwinrt serves an important and specific role, but further feature development risks destabilizing the project. Additional helpers are regularly contributed to complimentary projects such as https://github.com/microsoft/wil/.
From https://github.com/microsoft/cppwinrt/issues/1289#issuecomme...
In A Note on Fil-CGreat analysis, but the solution is so simple: RAII.
And this is offered as `unique_process_handle`[1] in the Windows Implementation Library (WIL)[2].
This is a fantastic addition to the Windows developer's toolkit, which everyone should be using from the outset. The Windows C API is unnecessarily verbose (although this can be said of any OS, Windows' is particularly bad), and simple mistakes can and will happen.
Let RAII help you, let the mighty close-scope token `} ` be your best friend.
[1]: https://github.com/microsoft/wil/blob/1f20cd086e07b9be54e70d...
[2]: https://github.com/microsoft/wil
In Finding a VS Code Memory LeakIn that case, make yourself a favour and use WIL, aka Windows Implementation Library.
https://github.com/microsoft/wil
In I built a native Windows Todo app in pure C (278 KB, no frameworks)> If it's not Cygwin, then what is it?
Looking at the source code[1], it appears to be analogous to MinGW in the MinGW:GNU/Linux:Windows relationship, but replace with MinC:BSD:Windows. In other words, a minimal user-mode layer that presents BSD headers (and therefore BSD symbols, macros, and types), libraries, and core utils to end-users, thus abstracting over MSVC†.
EDIT: replace 'MinGW' with 'Cygwin' above. So it is Cygwin.
I'd say calling it a 'kernel' is quite a stretch—there is not much that runs in kernel-mode, and everything runs atop the NT kernel which does the actual 'kernel'y stuff.
[1]: https://github.com/dboland/minc
†: Until one wants to use very recent and very nice Microsoft libraries[2][3], and these fail spectacularly because MinGW doesn't know about nice MSVC-specific stuff like SAL annotations[4].
[2]: https://github.
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> Although I don't start new projects in C very often, I'm acutely aware how it's not turtles all the way down (as the logophiles believe), but rather C. With some infrequent exceptions the whole tower of abstraction was written in C. SDL is written in C, the compiler? C, the Linux kernel is written in C, the graphics driver was written in C, the GPU firmware was C. It might be unfeasible for you to get by without writing these yourself, but with enough C and somewhere to sit you can move the earth.
This is a Linux-only situation. A significant fraction of systems code in Windows and macOS are written in fairly modern C++, including core system libraries and the kernel. A project that emerged out of Windows' C++ effort is the Windows Implementation Library[1]. I'm also certain Windows and macOS graphics drivers are written in C++.
[1]: ht
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Here we go: a thread on developing for Windows, and immediately there are several top-level comments saying 'don't'. I suppose you guys like leaving 75% of a potential install base out of consideration. More money for us Windows devs, I guess.
After having recently worked on a project at work that involved precisely this (migrating a Linux/macOS-first project to Windows), I feel like that table at the top is... not the whole story. I also disagree with the author's conclusion: the easiest and most compatible way to develop on Windows is to use Visual Studio 2022, full stop. Download, install the Desktop Development with C++ workload, and start writing code. Can't be easier. It comes with a built-in debugger, profiler, and various build tools like CMake, Ninja (if you don't like MSBuild/NMake), Clang-CL (if you don't like cl.exe), and much
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more.
My background is a little different to the author: I've been writing on and for Windows most of the time, and I was only introduced to Linux in university. In order of 'closeness to Linux':
- WSL1/2: these are for all intents and purposes Linux VMs (yes, not in the case of WSL1, but practically it might as well be). Use these as though you would a real Linux machine.
- Cygwin: in general, never use Cygwin for new projects. Cygwin means saddling your user with an entire Linux filesystem hierarchy per application, including stuff like `/bin`, `/etc`, `/lib`, and so on. Additionally, it pretends to support `fork()` on Windows. Windows and NT don't have fork(). Never had, and never will. Don't use it, full stop.
- MinGW: this targets the Itanium C++ ABI. An admirable but sadly incomplete effort. New Win32 APIs like cfapi.h[1] aren't available. Big Windows-specific libraries like Microsoft's WIL[2] cannot compile on MinGW because they rely on MSVC-specific extensions. Deal-breaker for me.
- MSVC providing cl.exe, and also LLVM's official Clang releases for Windows: best options. These target the MSVC C++ ABI and expect/provide a complete install of the Windows SDK and MSVC C and C++ runtimes.
In general, I dislike shoehorning Linux/UNIX onto Windows and vice versa.
System developers should recognise the differences between OS and platform-specific primitives, APIs, and interfaces, and abstract over them depending on their needs. Each implementation should live on its own and should be linked to by the build system, and not directly interspersed in code. This means no `#ifdef _WIN32 #elifdef DARWIN #elifdef __linux`.
Or—and a hot take incoming—if you don't want to do any of this, use a platform-independent managed/interpreted language like Java, C#, Go, or Python.
[1]: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/api/cfapi/
[2]: https://github.com/microsoft/wil/issues/117
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 fixi
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ng 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
a) Not just the Windows kernel - Office uses SAL, too, in numerous places. Mostly in legacy places predating more modern C++.
b) It's not true to say that kernel devs don't really use it. They use it a lot, though there are attempts at obsoleting some of it[0].
[0]: https://github.com/microsoft/wil
In RFC: C++ Buffer HardeningNot 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 exist
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ing kernel features in depth ....
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