Hacker News Reader

The Win32 API is on life-support. Microsoft will maintain backwards compatibility for legacy apps of course, but learning Win32 for new development doesn't seem like a good investment (unless, of course, you want to get a job maintaining a legacy Win32 app).

View on HN

Anything that runs on the Windows desktop uses Win32 at some point in its stack. If you work on anything that is close to Win32 then you may also need to work with Win32 itself.

For example if you work on a game engine or toolset then you must know Win32 - especially if you work on the tools, even if you are using a wrapper like wxWidgets or Qt.

The only time where you can avoid Win32 is if you're using something that completely abstracts away the entire system, like Java Swing or a web browser.

It's a little bit more complicated. Sure, if you're doing low-level programming I imagine you might run into the Win32 API, but if you're just building typical desktop applications (particularly for newer devices like the Surface Pro X or Surface Neo), you'll most likely want to use UWP. Usage of Win32 for app development is only going to decrease overtime for typical consumer applications. I'm sure businesses will continue building LOB apps in WPF and WinForms until the heat-death of the universe, but there's also businesses building apps in VB6 and you don't see many people recommending to learn that.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com