wil

> 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

Still is, for those that never discovered C++/CX, WIL or C++/WinRT and are stuck in the ways of Windows XP. https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/cpp/cppcx/exceptions-c-cx?v... https://github.com/microsoft/wil/blob/5a21cac10640f54b7ef886... https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/uwp/cpp-and-winrt-a...

We use this internally to help prevent leaks: https://github.com/Microsoft/wil/wiki/RAII-resource-wrappers

C++/WinRT tooling is so bad, that MFC feels modern. Ok, I got the point that they decided to stop doing language extensions and C++/CX was a dead end. Surely the PM that signed the idea to replace C++/CX, could have spent one minute considering not to ship a development experience that is worse than MFC. In 30 years haven't they had time to add syntax highlighting and code completion to IDL files? Ah, and the Windows team then ignores C++/WinRT on their own samples, and use their own internal WIL framework instead. https://github.com/microsoft/wil So you get some samples on MSDN now that after being rewritten from C++/CX into C++/WinRT, are also tainted with WIL library types