Switch from winapi to windows-rs

[senneh]

The winapi crate hasn't been updated in over a year and has been deprecated by windows-rs which are the official rust bindings to the windows api.

I think it would be better to switch sooner rather than later.

One consideration would be whether to use the windows or windows-sys crate.

[xStrom]

The API itself hasn't been updated even longer. We target APIs from a lot of years ago.

When I've previously looked at the windows crate it has been much more bloated than winapi. Slower compile times, larger binaries.

It does look like an eventuality of switching to windows. However unless there is an immediate benefit (e.g. using an API that isn't easily surfaced from winapi) or they have done a lot of optimization work recently, I don't think it's a good idea to do the switch right now. Especially if compile times suffer.

Is there any benefit in specific why you would like to switch sooner or is it because windows is the future?

[senneh]

Slower compile times, larger binaries.

Using the windows-sys crate is an option.

Is there any benefit in specific why you would like to switch sooner

Sure there is no immediate need, but it feels silly writing more code with winapi when it will have to be changed eventually.

[xStrom]

it feels silly writing more code with winapi when it will have to be changed eventually

I can understand that. However I would like to point out that the windows crate API hasn't stabilized either. There is no guarantee that we won't have to rewrite some code anyway.

[waywardmonkeys]

Might be worth pointing out that some configs already build windows, such as when accesskit is enabled. Of course other dependencies also use winapi ...

[waywardmonkeys]

I've been peeking at this off and on and at this point have some amount of code converted, currently as a big ball of changes and not trying to do something piece by piece (which seems hard).

I can't compare build times until it is done, but so far, there's some nice reduction in code in parts of the Glazier code (and like I said before, when accesskit is enabled, we're building a fair bit of things anyway).

I'm saying this here so that 1) interested parties know and 2) interested parties don't start trying to do the same thing yet and duplicate any effort.

I'd started as I was looking at using some other APIs and found that they were exposed via windows / windows-sys ... and didn't feel like doing the extra work.

[waywardmonkeys]

FWIW, now that I'm a couple of hours in, I'm probably going to toss it and switch to windows-sys .. at least experimentally.