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wil
C++2019–2026
microsoft / wil

wil

Windows Implementation Library

Mobile & DesktopLibraries & SDKs
Explore on GitHubRead Hacker News discussions
10Distinct people
26Mentions
0Explicit recommenders
3KGitHub stars
REPOSITORY AT A GLANCE

What to know before exploring

What it is

Windows Implementation Library

GitHub

Where it is used

No documented product use was verified in the last source check.

What people are saying

No recommendation phrase was found in the indexed comments.

No classified warning is attached to this page. Read the discussions before treating silence as approval.

Also in these discussions

No other repository is repeatedly linked in the same discussions.

This week on Hacker News

Nov 8–Nov 15 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/15/2026, 2:04:58 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.

02462019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 4 mentions; 2 submissions, 2 comments20192020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 6 mentions; 1 submissions, 5 comments2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 3 mentions; 0 submissions, 3 comments20222023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 3 mentions; 0 submissions, 3 comments2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 4 mentions; 0 submissions, 4 comments2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2027-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 6 mentions; 1 submissions, 5 comments. Incomplete calendar period.2026*

* 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
UTC ranges include their start and exclude their end. Select a period to filter the source evidence.
PeriodStart (UTC)End (exclusive, UTC)MentionsSubmissionsComments
20192019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC422
20202020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC000
20212021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC615
20222022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC303
20232023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC000
20242024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC303
20252025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC404
2026 (partial)2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2027-01-01 00:00:00 UTC615

What Hacker News says

3 sources
delta_p_delta_x·Dec 8, 2024
> 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
Read the rest
tps://github.com/microsoft/wil
In Flappy Bird in 1000 lines of C
delta_p_delta_x·Jul 24, 2024
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
In How to develop on Windows: comparing native, MinGW, Cygwin, WSL
pjmlp·Apr 20, 2024
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
In C-Macs – a pure C macOS application

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