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I've had to work with api functions like https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/api/winuser/... and friends. It was by far the most unpleasant api I've ever worked with.

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I think that particular pattern is a perfectly reasonable way to let the user ingest an arbitrarily long list of objects without having to do any preallocations -- or indeed, any allocations at all.

Because allocating well under a hundred handles is a biggest problem we have.

WinAPI is awful to work with for reasons above anyone’s comprehension. It’s just legacy riding on legacy, with initial legacy made by someone 50% following stupid patterns from the previous 8/16 bit decade and 50% high on mushrooms. The first thing you do with WinAPI is abstracting it tf away from your face.

Yes, but the inversion of control is unpleasant to deal with—compare Find{First,Next}File which don’t require that.

Which is a pattern that also exists in the Win32 API, for example in the handle = CreateToolhelp32Snapshot(), Thread32First(handle, out), while Thread32Next(handle, out) API for iterating over a process's threads.

I also find EnumChildWindows pretty wacky. It's not too bad to use, but it's a weird pattern and a pattern that Windows has also moved away from since XP.

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/toolhelp/tra...

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