Re: why microsoft choose mfc rather than wtl?

In article news:<uhad51l7gqaohjo544ig47m9l6m7mh69bg@xxxxxxx>, Joseph M. Newcomer
wrote:
> What are the advantages of WTL (which I keep hearing about but can't
> find any documentation about) over MFC (which has massive amounts of
> documentation)?

WTL is kinda neat ... it's very lightweight and can produce very small executables
(without relying on a huge preinstalled DLL to achieve this, the way that MFC apps do
to).

It doesn't have the broad range of features that MFC does, but it does provide
wrappings for wrap most of the GUI parts of Win32 that MFC wraps (and does so in
similar ways, so knowledge of MFC will help). The project is now run on SourceForge at
http://sourceforge.net/projects/wtl/ ... but there's no documentation that I can see
... Google will find some WTL documentation projects on the web, though.

One problem with WTL is that it uses C++ templates very heavily (or, as heavily as one
can with an elderly compiler like VC6 ... the current version may require VC7, I'm not
sure) and so is not for the beginner or the faint-hearted. It's definitely much harder
to extend/modify than MFC. I've written a few short apps in WTL and found it very
usable ... but I've never dared use it for a large client project (partly because I
have no confidence that my clients (or their customers) would be able to maintain the
heavily-templated code after I've moved on). It's no harder, really, than using ATL
for controls, though.

Cheers,
Daniel.




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