This is essentially what Vulkan does; there's a CreateInfo struct for every object creation or command function. And even then they managed to sort of mess it up, because they also have functions and objects suffixed with a '2', and the pNext extension mechanism.

Will never happen on Windows, especially not in user-mode libraries, and especially not something this pervasive.

Sadly the MSVC ABI makes std::span and std::string_view a pessimisation:

https://github.com/tringi/win64_abi_call_overhead_benchmark

https://godbolt.org/z/7baaox7re

> BTW: As a nice addition, if you use SAL annotations

> Windows C++ Programming

Not everyone will see the irony, but the Windows user-mode application and library suite and the kernel now very heavily rely on the safety mechanisms of C++ that the author calls 'complex', 'uglif[ied]', and has 'los[t] the taste for good readable code'. I'm of course referring to the Windows Implementation Library: https://github.com/microsoft/wil This is explicitly an effort from MS WinDev to make Windows C++ code safer. User-mode applications writing native Windows code can and absolutely should use it, too.

Any time I see `void*` in C++ I ring-fence it as a C-ism and make sure I `reinterpret_cast`. For me, a bag of bytes is `std::span`. void* is a memory location with no provenance, no ownership, no size information, nothing. Do I even know if it is this program's memory, or some shared memory construct, or maybe even a pointer into GPU memory? No for all.

C likes to play fast and loose and its proponents call it 'beautiful and simple', I call it a segfault/use-after-free/double-free waiting to happen.

Ah, so like how Wurmple may evolve into Silcoon or Cascoon and thence Beautifly or Dustox. Cool.

This was by far the biggest time sink in my maths courses, and frankly, a giant waste of time. Sure, the end result looked beautiful but I think I understood less of it than if I'd just written it all down on A4 ruled paper in gel pen.

You make this sound like it is some long-gone practice. I was writing maths by hand as recently as 2020 in university, for my CS-associated maths courses (linear algebra, calculus, physics for computer graphics, etc).

In pre-university essentially all coursework was done by hand, and the national exams are all still handwritten.

I have to manually set all of this up in Vim or Emacs, and frankly the debugging experience in GDB or LLDB is worse than it really ought to be. People actually need to use good tools to understand how nice things can be.

[1]: https://github.com/dotnet/winforms/blob/27e7cb2e5043780dd75e...

WinUI 3 is pretty decent. Have a look at first-party programs like PowerToys[1], or Windows Terminal[2].

[1]: https://github.com/microsoft/PowerToys

[2]: https://github.com/microsoft/terminal

They are not.

I use a KDE distribution at work. I regularly see GPU texture copy bugs like random lines across the middle of the display, or along the bottom edge. I use a 4K 144 Hz 16:9 display, and the Linux platform absolutely struggles with getting the scaling, resolution, and colour depth on all the dozens of GUI toolkits correct. Subpixel antialiasing doesn't work on many applications. It doesn't matter if I am using Wayland or X; both are bad experiences.

> dual-Sonos / Airpod setup by... clicking the sound icon

Speaking of sound... Linux doesn't even pick up my Audient interface unless I physically reinsert the USB cable. It doesn't have a channel or volume control for audio feedback from my mic to my outputs. If I change the output volume slider down from 100%, the actual volume output is asymmetric—one channel is considerably louder than the other at 50%.

I have experienced issues with wpa_supplicant, iwd/iwctl, and systemd-networkd fighting each other. Why are there even so many network managers? Why does the platform not provide one?

I will disagree until the cows come home that any Linux desktop interface (again, bar Android... but like I said, Android is almost an entirely different platform) is less jank than Windows. People bring up Windows' old UIs, but said UIs still work. gpedit.exe, regedit.exe, msc.exe, services.exe, ncpa.cpl, perfmon.exe, windbg.exe, these are things that haven't changed in nearly 3 decades.

That being said I do notice that many of the rounded corners aren't fully transparent...

I don't know why people suggest Linux for desktop use at the first swoop. I dislike it. I dislike how janky its various GUI desktop managers are, I dislike how edge cases that are handled straightforwardly on Windows just aren't on Linux. Things like high pixel density, different audio setups, multi-touch trackpad support, notebook battery life management, and more. The bazaar thing contributes to all of these sharp edges and jank.

And more importantly I dislike the sanctimony of the Linux community, I dislike the distribution and the linking model of most desktop distributions, I dislike how it is 'developers first' and not 'users first', unless a giant entity rewrites the entire user mode stack to provide a useful, straightforward, and mostly intuitive platform interface (that is, Android).

An OS is more than the kernel. It is the entire platform including user-mode libraries, toolkits, and applications. For all its faults, I find the Windows platform better than any Linux distro platform, except one.

> Hardware features are contained in the kernel. GUI has nothing to do with them.

What I listed aren't only hardware features; they are platform interfaces that can be programmed against to produce user-mode applications without having to muck around with kernel interfaces. In fact the less as a user or user-mode developer I have to work with the kernel, the better, and Windows provides a gigantic surface area for that.

I am happy with how Windows works, I like a Windows workflow, I like developing for and on Windows, I like gaming on Windows. I've used it for 26 years and broadly have no issues with it. It is a pretty superb platform which regressed after Windows 10, and about 99% of the problems with it are user-mode frameworks and applications, thin coats of paint. Windows isn't even close to 'beyond salvation'.