Re:Ask HN: Why is building Windows apps so complicated?
by viraptor on Monday December 13, 2021 @10:50PM
(#29548017)
I believe that's very much related. The more of the nice wrappers you provide, the more you have to decide if someone needs them all or are you providing them on demand. With .net core doing more splitting than framework and with Java going through a decade of jigsaw, I think we collectively decided we don't want to include everything upfront.
We don't even require the internet for building/development. In .net land you require internet to get the dependency you're using the first time. If you want to get them all and distribute/install before you start development, you can totally do that. It's just not the default behaviour.
That being said, WinForms is also "just" a Win32 wrapper, I don't see a compelling reason why a similar wrapper wouldn't be possible in pretty much any language. .NET 4.6 is a fine choice too, especially because you're not forced to ship runtime and standard library, as Windows already has both.