It's not just a crutch, it's a legit wheelchair!

Patches and scripts to make the C "binding" of Windows Runtime (WinRT) more C and less microsoft. In particular, to make it usable with MinGW. Little effort (if any) has been put into keeping the code consumable by MSVC (I'm not against the idea, but have neither MSVC nor the time).

'Cause life is too short to upstream the fixes (again, not because I'm against it) or maintain a fork.

These instructions assume you (1) don't have the original (MSVC-specific) winrt headers to apply the patches to and (2) want to generate said headers.

make, cppwinrt, coreutils, grep, patch, sed, xargs. See below for cppwinrt, the rest can be installed by invoking:

• on Debian, # apt install make coreutils grep patch sed findutils;

• on MSYS2, # pacman --sync --needed make coreutils grep patch sed findutils.

If you don't have (the desired version of) cppwinrt and don't want to / cannot build from source, you can obtain it by invoking

$ make bin/cppwinrt.exe

This will download the latest build from nuget.org. You'll need curl and unzip commands (eponymous to packages). If latest doesn't work for you in the end, try

$ make CPPWINRT_VERSION=2.0.210122.3 bin/cppwinrt.exe

This will get you the latest (and currently the only) version the patches are known to be compatible with.

$ make originals
$ make --jobs=$(nproc)

The fist command generates original (MSVC-specific) winrt headers from windows metadata (.winmd) files. By default it looks for them in $WINDIR/SysNative/WinMetadata or maybe in $WINDIR/System32/WinMetadata or thereabouts. If needed, override this using the CPPWINRT_INPUT variable (see also cppwinrt -help for possible special values to use here).

The second command populates the include directory with the final output: patched/wrapped winrt headers usable with MinGW. It can take some time.

It is highly recommended to run tests if you have some other combination than windows 8.1 x86-64 & cppwinrt 2.0.210122.3 & g 10:

$ (cd test && make --jobs=$(nproc))

You'll actually need MinGW for this. The package names in Debian are g -mingw-w64-{i686,x86-64}, in MSYS2 they are mingw-w64-{i686,x86_64}-gcc.

Right now, the testing procedure comprises, mostly: including each of the API headers into separate hello-world-ish programs, compiling and running them. It takes a while. Also, the XAML headers will eat all your RAM and ask for seconds; reduce --jobs then.

Finally,

# make install

to copy the headers to $PREFIX/include, where $PREFIX is /usr/local by default.

Currently requires a hacky incantation in the form of an option added to your preprocessor flags (CPPFLAGS):

-iquote /usr/local/include/winrt/yolort_impl

This assumes /usr/local/include is where you have the headers installed. If you have them in an unusual or project-specific place, don't forget to also add that place to CPLUS_INCLUDE_PATH or specify via the -I option.

Otherwise, #include <winrt/Windows.Foo.h> as usual.

The module unit (winrt/winrt.ixx) likely doesn't and, thus, isn't present in the final output. (Meh, GCC doesn't yet really have modules support anyway.)

See the example subdir. Currently only a minimal working example of sending toast notifications is provided. To build, run $ make from within the directory.

MIT

The most useful thing right now is to try this on as many projects, systems, architectures, cppwinrt versions and compilers as possible, and report any issues, including compiler warnings and deficiencies in good developer experience (DX?).