That is a valid concern. On the other hand, win32 has a strong developer community with 20+ years of legacy as the primary API of Windows. Now only if Microsoft hadn't try to screw its own developers by trying to push a new framework every 5 years.

It does but as you say due to the emperor's new clothes every few years, the loyalty isn't there now. I know of no companies doing greenfield desktop dev that are using any of their tech. It's all Qt, CEF, python/wx and JavaFX. Even the financial companies we deal with who were pretty heavy with the WPF are canning it next cycle.

Incumbent MFC, Winforms and WPF stuff will live as long as VB6 did (and still does) though.

Edit as HN won't let me reply (submitting too fast). In Europe and JavaFX also has hardware acceleration as does CEF as it uses Chrome's rendering engine.

That's interesting.

>> Even the financial companies we deal with who were pretty heavy with the WPF are canning it next cycle.

Where are you based? What are they planning to adopt?

My company is consulting a couple of hedge funds in New York and they have no plans of replacing WPF for their trading apps.

The desktop CLR VM plus proper GPU acceleration makes WPF faster than any alternative (when avoiding binding). As far as I'm aware no other UI toolkit comes anywhere close.

> Edit as HN won't let me reply

But it does, it just hides the link. All you have to do is to go to the child's comment by clicking the time link, then you'll get a reply box. In your case the comment you probably want to reply to is this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10416018

ssssh! There is a reason the system is as it is...

So how would it hurt anybody exactly?

Shareholders.

I doubt shareholders would be hurt by making things easier for developers. It's a retarded mentality that lock-in is good (while it hurts developers).

developers will abandon win32 whether windows supports posix or not