For the past few days, I have been trying to find a library that would allow me to write programs with a GUI in C++. My requirements were pretty strai

Writing GUI apps for Windows is painful

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2024-06-30 19:00:06

For the past few days, I have been trying to find a library that would allow me to write programs with a GUI in C++. My requirements were pretty straightforward:

At first glance, it looks like an excellent choice. It allows you to use modern Windows components while also letting you customize the styling colors. For design, you can use XAML, which is super easy to grasp, or you can just use the Visual Studio designer directly.

Problem: Shipping the app in unpackaged form is not well supported. Most of the time when I have tried moving the app to a VM or a different computer, it fails to launch due to some obscure dependencies missing. To make it worse, you need to supply a bunch of .dll files that handle the WinUI functionality. There is no way to have a single portable .exe file. Using packaged form usually works without any issues, but they are installed as AppX packages which brings many issues on its own (especially if you need access to all Win32 APIs).

I need high portability, so it would make sense to use the OS’s native rendering. Such a program could be a single .exe file (given that we statically link MFC) and would also be super small (just a few kilobytes). I could also use a more minimal library that someone has already written, which means it would be really easy to get from concept to working app fast.