What Features Should A GUI toolkit have?

[Paulo Pinto via Digitalmars-d]

On Saturday, 7 March 2015 at 11:16:44 UTC, ponce wrote:
> On Saturday, 7 March 2015 at 10:04:21 UTC, Kagamin wrote:
>> On Friday, 6 March 2015 at 21:22:31 UTC, rumbu wrote:
>>> Anyway, it's clear for me that the age of native controls is 
>>> history. Today interfaces are described in markup languages, 
>>> the OS is responsible to render it, there is a clear 
>>> separation between the user interface and the code behind.
>>
>> Markup is just a frontend, it can work with anything. In fact, 
>> history only returned to where it started: UI was described in 
>> DSL since early versions of Windows (resources), you couldn't 
>> waste RAM on UI-building code, instead OS was instructed to 
>> read dialog resource and build the window for you, the 
>> resource was discarded right away, every byte was counted.
>
> Oh so it was for RAM reasons.
> I've always wondered why it was that way for MFC. Since then I 
> much prefer UI-building code.

MFC has an interesting background.

I always favoured OWL and VCL, which had a more C++ friendly 
programming model than what MFC does.

Apparently Microsoft did a poor job making a similar framework 
and from AFX ashes, MFC was born. Hence the Afx prefix.

http://computer-programming-forum.com/82-mfc/d13ea80282846f9f.htm

So we had to wait until Windows 8, to have finally something 
similar to VCL, via XAML/C++.

--
Paulo