TCC supports win32 and is less than a meg download and as an added bonus supports linux very well thanks to wine.

I used to code Win32 around the Win 95/98/2000 era (my first VC++ was 1.0 for 16bit) but switched to BSD and Linux around 2000 and haven't looked back. I avoid Windows as much as possible and did learn about .NET and how slow it was but I'm a bit shocked that Win32 is still a thing and still being recommended. Sort of makes me happy and sad at the same time...

That is why everyone even Microsoft themselves does Electron.

Running with html/css/js has benefits it really is open and free development based on international standards and not locked into any single big tech.

Thank you for the detailed write up.

I’m was thinking about building native windows UI, wrapping around cross platform library written in swift. I did not know it was that messy and complicated.

TCC is less than a meg to download supports win32 very well and as an added bonus created executables run fine under linux wine.

Because I didnt see it already mentioned. Avalonia[1] and Uno[2] for C# are also really great if you want to write windows apps. I wrote some in Avalonia that worked incredible nice on Linux and Windows.

You dont have to use MVVM or AXML for example Uno allows for C# Markup[3] to be used instead or MVUX instead of MVVM.

I personally hate MVVM and AXML but you are not forced to use them.

For Avalonia I dabbled in creating my own replacement[4] for MVVM and AXML using Flecs.Net.

In Avalonia I created a tray icon for the trash bin. So I can see how big it is and clear/open it with a small menu[5].

Both Avalonia and Uno should at least be looked at when judging which framework to use. They are both quite mature and have many great controls and features built in.

[1] https://avaloniaui.net/ [2] https://platform.uno/ [3] https://platform.uno/docs/articles/external/uno.extensions/d... [4] https://github.com/AyanamiKaine/Ayanami-sTower/blob/main/Ava... [5] https://github.com/AyanamiKaine/Ayanami-sTower/blob/main/App...

*has been for 20+ years

Meanwhile editions of Gnome come with Gnome Builder and Flatpak has solved the distribution problem. Things are so much better today on Linux than most people who have used Windows will even remember.

Best framework for this is Qt.

Steve Gibson, Gibson Research.

https://www.grc.com/freepopular.htm

Just scroll down the page and look at the size of the completely self-contained executable programs. THIS is what Win32 is capable of. Something we always had with Win32 that was thrown away with .Net and C#.

And _please_ just spare me your opinions of how Steve Gibson "doesn't know anything about security". That's not what's important here. What's important is how freakin' small his full-on GUI stand-alone executables are.

EDIT: Just noticed this on his page.

Total Historical Count of files downloaded from this page: 52,292,601

This all seems like a direct result of measuring employee performance using "impact".