This is not to say that WinForms isn't without its problems. I often wonder what it could be like if all the effort of making WPF and MAUI had gone into maintaining, modernizing and improving it.
My only major problem with winforms is that it's still using GDI under the hood which, despite what many people believe, is actually still primarily software-rendered. If they could just swap out Winforms for Direct2D under the hood (or at least allow a client hint at startup to say "prefer Direct2D") it would really bring new life to Winforms, I think.
I would also like a C++ native GUI API that's more modern than MFC
There have been similar F# libraries and third-party C# libraries for a while that seem nice to work with in similar ways.
[1] https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/apps/windows-dotne...
MFC was already relatively bad versus OWL. Borland[0] kept improving it with VCL and nowadays FireMonkey.
There there is Qt as well.
Microsoft instead came up with ATL, and when they finally had something that could rival C++ Builder, with C++/CX, a small group managed to replace it with C++/WinRT because they didn't like extensions, the irony.
With complete lack of respect for paying customers, as C++/WinRT never ever had the same Visual Studio tooling experience as C++/CX.
Nowadays it is in maintenance, stuck in C++17, working just good enough for WinUI 3.0 and WinAppSDK implementation work, and the riot group is having fun with Rust's Windows bindings.
So don't expect anything good coming from Microsoft in regards to modern C++ GUI frameworks.
[0] - Yes nowadays others are at the steering wheel.
It quickly became apparent that WinUI3 was the only one even close to viable for our use case, and we tried getting a basic prototype running with out legacy backend code. We kept running into dealbreakers we hoped would be addressed in the alleged future releases, like the lack of tables, or the baffling lack of a GUI UI designer (like every other previous Win framework).
...We're currently writing our GUI in Qt.
Having said this, from 3rd parties, Avalonia is probably the best option.
While I think Uno is great as well, they lose a bit by betting on WinUI as foundation on Windows, and that has been only disappointment after disappointment since Project Reunion.
