Is WTL (Windows Template Library) still maintained and should I use it to create new Windows programs in C++?

Question

I'm interested if I still should use WTL to write Windows applications? I really like how it's written but does anyone know if it is still maintained? (Maybe there is a port that someone maintains unofficially?)

If WTL is not recommended to write new Windows applications, what new frameworks are there that I could look up and use?

Answer 1

The WTL was opensourced by Microsoft in 2004. Since then it's been updated by the community. The latest release (10.x) was 2021-11-10. You can check out the latest, see what they are working on, etc from SourceForge.

I don't see why you shouldn't use this to build your app.

https://sourceforge.net/projects/wtl/

Answer 2

I use the WTL myself. The WTL is a thin layer on top of the native Win32 API. It was based on the very rudimentary windowing library included with the ATL.

The advantages of the WTL for me are: it produces very lightweight and snappy GUI applications; and if you can follow Petzold, you can figure out the WTL. A lot of the newer GUI libraries make simple things easy, but when you need to delve deep into the Win32 arcana, tend to be more of an impediment than help in my experience.

Some drawbacks are: it is Windows-only; it relies heavily on inheritance, so you can end up with cumbersome class hierarchies; and it supports multiple Windows versions with #define's, so you can't easily use the latest features available, while gracefully falling back to older versions.

To give you an example of this last drawback, if you want to support back to Windows XP, then your file dialogs are going to look quite dated compared to the Vista+ dialogs.

Answer 3

I know this is an old post. However for those that read this they might be interested to know that the latest version (10.x) of the WTL on source forge is dated 2021-11-10. The link is https://sourceforge.net/projects/wtl/.