Borland C++ was extremely good: a C++ compiler, standard library, and IDE with debugger that fit in about five megabytes. With the cozy yellow-on-blue Borland colour scheme.
I was quite surprised how bad MFC was by comparison, then OWL got replaced by VCL, still quite good, while MFC continued bad as always.
While Borland had an approach that we could get nice high level frameworks in C++ (a sentiment that Qt also shares), Microsoft C++ folks seemed keen in keeping their beloved MFC as low level as possible.
I read somewhere that MFC originally was similar in concept, but faced too much resistance internally, thus the outcome and was rewriten.
And to this day Microsoft hasn't been able to deliver a C++ framework that is as nice to use as those from Borland.
> I read somewhere that MFC originally was similar in concept,
This is what AFX was. They reused some of the core pieces, so the AFX name persisted into MFC.
> but faced too much resistance internally, thus the outcome and was rewriten.
The concern was that developers who had just ascended the Win16 API learning curve would now have to ascend another totally different learning curve to understand the framework. MFC developed from a (supposedly) nice object oriented framework into a way to avoid explicitly passing handles to API calls. (It also replaced message cracking and a few other things.)
By the time Visual C++ rolled around, Microsoft started adding higher level abstractions to MFC and building it back out a bit, but the underlying damage was done.
> And to this day Microsoft hasn't been able to deliver a C++ framework that is as nice to use as those from Borland.
ATL was supposedly quite nice, as was the mostly unsupported WTL derivative (that supported complete app development).
Yeah, that was the thing with Afx, kind of forgotten it, thanks.
ATL was and is, anything but nice, unless one is into deep love with COM without tooling, to this day Visual Studio still doesn't offer anything to alleviate the pain of dealing with COM, IDL and generating C++ stubs, because just like MFC and Afx, it seems there are many internal feuds against having nice tools.
The only time Microsoft finally created something nice to use COM from C++ (C++/CX), those internal feuds managed to kill it, replace it with a developer experience just as bad as ATL (C++/WinRT), and then when bored left the project to play with Rust/WinRT.
