Microsoft historically brings out a bunch of (often half-finished) APIs and then either officially or unofficially deprecates them rapidly (has any MS UI toolkit since win32 actually survived more than a decade with active maintenance?) Apple historically does not.

Do you have examples of those? I'm not an expert at all on this topic, but WPF and WinForms have been released in 2006 and can still be used to develop windows graphical applications as far as I understand.

Even better as far as I can tell, WPF, WinForms, and WinUI are open source since 2018: https://www.hanselman.com/blog/AnnouncingWPFWinFormsAndWinUI...

Repositories:

- WPF: https://github.com/dotnet/wpf

- WinForms: https://github.com/dotnet/winformsblog-scottha

- WinUI: https://github.com/Microsoft/microsoft-ui-xaml

Now, I'm not familiar with those technologies, and don't use them, so I may be missing some things.

I mean, they've shoved them on GitHub, but are they still doing any significant work on them? My impression was the WPF at least had kind of been in limbo for years.

There's a roadmap.md on github showing MS's intentions for WPF -- first and foremost, porting to .Net Core. So there is, at least, active (and I'd say significant) development. But...

Not trying to sound facetious, but does WPF need any other significant work? It's a UI framework for Windows desktop apps (narrow and specific scope), it's stable and "just works", it's well-documented, it's officially supported, etc. Does there need to be anything else, or are we looking at it from the POV of more "modern" UI frameworks, where no active churn == languishing on the wayside?

Also, the relationship between UWP XAML and WPF XAML is a lot closer than (for example) Win16 versus Win32 or MFC versus WinForms. Even if WPF is "just in maintenance mode", UWP is seeing active development. Some of UWP XAML additions have even back-ported to WPF, and "XAML Islands" even mean support for putting UWP XAML directly inside WPF XAML.

Apple kind of did it to OpenCL because they really want people to use Metal. That’s the only example that comes to mind, though.

Not their own thing, though. They’ve killed off plenty of third party standards (whatever happened to first party X11 for MacOS, say?)