xlang

> why Microsft has ceased anything beyond legacy support for it That is not true at all. DirextX is COM, UWP was COM based, WinRT is still COM, WinUI and the Windows App SDK is again based on COM. C++, C#, Python and Rust are all supported programming languages for the Windows App SDK thanks to - you guessed it: COM. The C++, C# and Rust language projections for it are still being constantly updated: https://github.com/microsoft/xlang When they started Project Reunion (code name for Windows APP SDK) back in 2021, just before Windows 11's release, they decided to double-down on COM. Like hard. https://github.com/microsoft/WindowsAppSDK/blob/main/docs/fa... > Practically speaking, any language & runtime that can handle COM objects can support Windows App SDK

The example is not .NET in general, but that specific event when Microsoft reneged on open development tooling[1]. For some people, that was the moment they stopped trusting "new Microsoft" to keep their word (though for me, it was when the Python language server was replaced with a DRM-locked, LSP-noncompliant one[2] a bit before that; unlike with .NET hot reload, they didn't backtrack there). I can think the company makes great open .NET tools and at the same time not trust them to close those down on a whim. Does anyone know where the open xlang implementation of MIDL[3] went, by the way? (Unlike the original 1990s MIDL, you can't reimplement this one from the language grammar in the docs, because there is no language grammar in the docs[4].) [1] https://dusted.codes/can-we-trust-microsoft-with-open-source and links there [2] https://g

Would be more interesting Swift on top of WinRT/xlang. https://github.com/Microsoft/xlang That would also means you would be able to deal with WinUI XAML and all.

Not at present, at least not reasonably. There are Python WinRT bindings under development (https://github.com/Microsoft/xlang/tree/master/src/package/p...) but they don't (yet?) support the "composable types" type system feature (basically a form of implementation inheritance) that the WinUI and Composition types require. So you'd basically have to write your own support for this.

There are also new Python bindings for WinRT (which is based on COM): https://github.com/Microsoft/xlang/tree/master/src/package/p...

its open sourced https://github.com/Microsoft/xlang kind of swig for com/winrt supporting just now only c++ and python https://github.com/Microsoft/xlang/wiki/xlang-faq

COM is not windows specific any more! Or rather there is a portable COM-like thing which looks like a good fit for cross language development https://github.com/Microsoft/xlang It's from the team who delivered cppwinrt (aka moderncpp). So the C++ projection doesn't have all the nasty baggage one usually associates with COM. https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/mt745094.aspx?f=25...

Take a look at this. https://github.com/Microsoft/xlang

On the bright side - since this is a brand new thing built from bottom up, we're not limited by past API design choices. In particular, I hope that this time we can get a standardized ABI that goes well above what C (the current de facto standard) had to offer. Language evolution went far beyond where things were back in 1980s, and the set of common features across various languages has also increased substantially - and that should be reflected in the ABI. Speaking of which: https://github.com/Microsoft/xlang

I think Microsoft might also be working on a newer system with that goal: https://github.com/Microsoft/xlang I haven't really looked at that in detail, but I would find any tooling for better language interoperability very worthwhile.