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Life As a C++/MFC Programmer

One vast improvement over raw C/API development is the use of the C++ programming language.

In many ways, C++ can be thought of as an object-oriented 

layer on top of C. Thus, even though

C++ programmers benefit from the famed “pillars of OOP” (encapsulation, inheritance, and poly-

morphism), they are still at the mercy of the painful aspects of the C language (e.g., manual memory

management, ugly pointer arithmetic, and ugly syntactical constructs).

Despite its complexity, many C++ frameworks exist today. For example, the Microsoft Founda-

tion Classes (MFC) provide the developer with a set of C++ classes that facilitate the construction of

Win32 applications. The main role of MFC is to wrap a “sane subset” of the raw Win32 API behind a

number of classes, magic macros, and numerous code-generation tools (a.k.a. 

wizards). Regardless

of the helpful assistance offered by the MFC framework (as well as many other C++-based window-

ing toolkits), the fact of the matter is that C++ programming remains a difficult and error-prone

experience, given its historical roots in C.