MS making Win32 api available in other languages

[coffeeprogrammer]

Does anyone have more details on this than just what it says in the article? A few months ago I tried writing to the Win32 api in masm and it was kinda of fun and I felt like I could learn alot of the apis and windows things in the process. I was taking a break from C# coding, when I got to the sd times I found this article. I found it kinda of interesting.

Microsoft makes Win32 APIs available to more languages - SD Times

Microsoft has expanded the scope of Win32 APIs beyond support for C and C++, with added support for C# and Rust through the win32metadata project now available in preview on GitHub. Other languages will follow, according to the Windows development team. Previously, developers using languages...

sdtimes.com

 

[PHolder]

Most mature languages have a way to call OS specific code, such as the Windows API. Usually it's some sort of external definition. It appears that what is going on here is that MS is publishing ( https://www.nuget.org/packages/Microsoft.Windows.SDK.Win32Metadata/17.0.2-preview ) the WinAPI in a specific format ( https://www.ecma-international.org/publications-and-standards/standards/ecma-335/ ) that can be parsed by user written tools to generate code (or header files, or packages, or whatever is needed) to allow access to WinAPI from languages they don't directly support (as well as the three they do support: C#, C++, Rust.) You can see some of them on the GitHUB page https://github.com/microsoft/win32metadata (right now there is D Lang, Dart and Zig.)

If one wanted, one could support Assembly by generating some macros/functions to wrap calls to these Windows APIs. That ofc would be somewhat antithetical to the small is better mantra of Assembly, but time to code matters too, IMHO.

 

[gleclaire]

Since they are supporting Rust now and it uses LLVM ( https://www.infoworld.com/article/3...e-power-behind-swift-rust-clang-and-more.html ) there is some groundwork done for other language the use LLVM. Microsoft has a number of people supporting their Rust initiative from the C++ and Golang camps. Those 2 languages are used very heavily with Python in the infrastructure of Azure.