I suspect there were no career improvement opportunities behind the effort, simple as that.

> instead of updating to the new Windows ways of dynamic libraries.

What does this mean?

This is the one I've been using and it's decent. I'm just worried that there hasn't been much activity in the repo and fear it's abandoned.

I thought at first it was a way to share the symbol tables between multiple instances (though you could use memory mapping), but then I read this in the README.md:

> Server is written in C, with no special headers or SDK used.

So maybe it helps them keep the parser simpler? Decouples that part from the GUI in a way they prefer?

`dumpbin /dependents` gives similar information. I use the following PowerShell function to get output that's a bit closer to ldd:

  function ldd($ExePath) {
      $Dumpbin = gi "C:\Program Files*\Microsoft Visual Studio\*\*\VC\Tools\MSVC\*\bin\HostX64\x64\dumpbin.exe"
      $Done = $false
      & $Dumpbin /dependents $ExePath
          | ? {$_.StartsWith("  ")}
          | % {$_.Substring(2)}
          | % {if ($Done) {} elseif ($_ -eq "Summary") {$Done = $true} else {$_}}
          | % {if ($_.StartsWith("  ")) {$_.Substring(2)}}
  }

There is actual the ldd available on Win32, along with gcc, objdump, etc...

It comes with the mingw or msys suite.

Also is there an equivalent to this for Linux?

If you do have headers, you don't have to write the bindings by hand: https://github.com/dotnet/ClangSharp?tab=readme-ov-file#gene...

Also because this is Windows, there is https://github.com/microsoft/CsWin32 already (and adjacent libraries) which rely on the same generator.

Which is the reason that to this day I remain a big C++/CLI fan.

It is still much easier than dealing with P/Invoke and COM from .NET code.

Create a nice wrapper, exposing C# compatible types and we're done.

In regards to COM, not even the CCW/RCW replacement is as developer friendly as VB 6 or Delphi.

I have some hopes that Secure Future Initiative will finally give the spotlight to .NET on Windows, that Windows team keeps pushing away, unlike what happens on Apple and Google platforms.