win32metadata

Its close in spirit to DRM: they enforce that if you are using their projects, it is under their legal terms. Many of their VS Code extensions[0] have license terms which /prohibit/ them from being used in editors that are not Microsoft's VS Code editor, and Microsoft can issue cease-and-desist for violations of this, as well as 'open source forks of VS Code' using their marketplace services. Microsoft also has a pattern they follow where they publish repositories on GitHub to proclaim they are open source, while actually distributing proprietary binary blobs in them that are fundamental core parts of functionality to the codebase[2][3][4] [0] https://github.com/microsoft/vscode-cpptools/issues/6388#iss... [1] https://github.com/microsoft/vscode-cpptools/issues/5784 [2] https://github.com/microsoft/win32metadata/issues/766 [3] https://dev

I'm always looking for alternatives to AutoHotkey and small C WINAPI programs I've written. Rust doesn't quite cut it, even with Microsoft's windows-rs library using the WinAPI functions is worse than it was with plain C. This is because you have to hunt the right libraries and features to import, it's surprisingly time-consuming. Excited to look how LuaRT exposes WinAPI, my ideal would be one global namespace where you can easily auto-import all the normal functions. Microsoft has made it somewhat easy for library authors to generate the externs with their relatively new Win32metadata package: https://github.com/microsoft/win32metadata

Have you looked at Microsoft's Win32 API metadata package [0]? They're using it to generate C# and Rust bindings, and other people have targeted other languages. [0] https://github.com/microsoft/win32metadata