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Yeah, Win32 (Windows API) will be around for a long time one way or the other, and there is a ton of tooling and docs around it. Even for non-Windows usage it is to be considered in certain situations.

> Don't be swayed by the propaganda. Especially if your application has essentially no untrusted input.

Even without untrusted inputs, in 2026 one should think twice before selecting C++ for a new project. There are still some reasons to do so, of course, but Win32 isn't one of them -- one can use it from a memory safe language just fine, e.g. https://github.com/microsoft/windows-rs

by pjc501 hours ago|

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If you don't want to spend quite so much time byte shaving, and you don't want to deal with memory safety or _UNICODE, you can do it in .Net Framework in half the time.

by feznyng2 hours ago|

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How do you make your win32 app look good to the average person?

by userbinator33 minutes ago|

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Depends what you mean by "look good".

The main function of the app being discussed here is to draw solid black rectangles on the screen.

Don't forget the "average person", I'm assuming someone relying on software as a tool, doesn't care about the stuff "designers" seem to obsess over, and will actively hate if you break their workflow by doing things like adding useless padding that makes them scroll more or shows less information in the name of "modernity". There's a lot of specialized niche software for various industries, often very expensive too, which looks like it came out in the early 90s. As long as it works well, users won't complain.

by alt22731 minutes ago|

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Disable borders and design your app nicely with images to replace standard user input elements.

by VerifiedReports23 minutes ago|

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That sounds like a great way to make a mess. Look at Microsoft's own apps shunning proper File dialogs and instead presenting a giant, bizarre pane of mostly text and a few crudely-drawn boxes in order to save a file. You have no idea what you're looking at or where you are in the file system.

Then there's the removal of title bars from Windows. You often have no idea what app you're looking at. Pull up a PDF in Acrobat and also in Edge. Now, at a glance, which is which?

Regressive garbage.

by themafia1 hours ago|

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If your application saves me time (is intuitive) or enables me to do tasks that I couldn't do before (is powerful) then I don't care one whit what it looks like. As long as it doesn't actively hurt my eyes to stare at you can do whatever you want.

by feznyng1 hours ago|

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Sure, if I'm building something for myself or fellow hobbyists this approach works (though in that case I'd prefer a good TUI/CLI). But if you're building an app for the average person, how it looks has a big effect on whether they choose it over an alternative.

by rkagerer24 minutes ago|

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It's funny, the "modern" look has become a countersignal for me. If the app looks like a webpage, I instinctively don't want it. Not because of aesthetics, but simply because I've come to associate that style of appearance with a lack of (or awkward) keyboard shortcuts, featuresets dumbed down to a level appropriate for chimps, various nags injecting friction against getting work done (ads, feature tours, logins, update reminders, etc) and laggy, resource-squandering performance thanks to some kind of bloated rendering framework like Electron with multiple V8 hosting processes sprawled across chrome.exe instances or whatever.

Case in point, the Dropbox Simplified Desktop App was a huge improvement for me. It nails just about everything I ever needed their app to do, and removes all the user-hostile fluff I never asked for. Similarly, I found Windows 11 Enterprise IoT LTSC to offer an improved desktop experience compared to traditional Windows, thanks to its exclusion of a lot of the cruft Microsoft otherwise shoves down the throats of users who, as far as I can tell from frank discussions with many of them, likewise actively don't want.

I'm not saying your desire to make your app look polished means it's crap, but beauty is in the eye of the beholder. Just like fashion, I wouldn't be surprised if we see a shift in the aesthetics trend as more people discover a retro feel sometimes signals a better user experience.

by joe_mamba1 hours ago|

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IDK man, I wonder how TF did the creators of Winamp do it? Were they so much smarter than the programers of today? And Winamp 2.95 still works on WIndows 11 today.

IIRC Borland Delphi was the most popular tool back then for making Win32 apps since it was so easy to use.

by pjc5047 minutes ago|

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https://github.com/alexfreud/winamp : does indeed look like classic Win32 in the files I randomly tried, although there's also a QT DLL and a whole load of other stuff on there.

by userbinator35 minutes ago|

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Were they so much smarter than the programers of today?

The average programmer back then was probably far more knowledgeable of the low-level details.