Say if you had to develop a huge windows desktop app what language/technology you believe will be supported longer by MS (or by its manufacturer if not MS product)?
What language/framework would give the app greater longevity without the need to be adapted or rewritten in order to run on newer versions of windows as they are released?
C++ Win32 API?(will MS ever rewrite those?)
C# .NET?WPF?
Delphi, wxWidgets, Qt or some other crazy thing?
Please for the sake of the argument lets not dwell on other aspects of the question.
What will give the app greater life is the question here.
There’s really no safe bet. Just pick one of the major ones and hope for the best.
My employer makes a 2 million line windows app, originally started in 1995. At the time they knew it was going to become a large long-living code base, so they faced the same choice. At the time, java was nothing, .NET didn’t exist, qt and wxwidgets were meaningless specks on the horizon. The choices were C++/MFC, Delphi and VB. They chose Delphi, because VB didn’t seem powerful enough, and C++ seemed too complicated to retrain the existing developers for.
Delphi was and is the smallest platform in marketshare of those three, but surprisingly it has proven the best choice. There hasn’t been the major porting effort that happened in the VB world with the .NET transition. At the same time, Delphi has kept up with new windows api’s as they were introduced. Crucially, because it’s more high-level than C++, the codebase has proven quite manageable for a small team.
All this is to say that you never know whether you’re making the right choice. If you pick one of the major platforms, it’s likely that you’ll have sane upgrade paths. Likely, but not a given.