microsoft/windows-rs

This repository is the official Microsoft collection of Rust packages (called crates) for building applications on Windows. It gives Rust developers access to the full Windows programming surface, from low-level system calls all the way up to high-level user interface components, all written in Rust without requiring C++ or COM knowledge. The collection is organized into many separate crates, each covering a specific area of the Windows platform. At the lower end, windows-sys provides raw bindings to C-style Windows APIs with minimal overhead. The windows crate offers safer, more ergonomic wrappers for the same APIs. For graphical work, windows-canvas provides 2D drawing built on Direct2D, and windows-reactor is a declarative UI library backed by WinUI 3. Other crates handle specific subsystems: windows-registry for registry access, windows-result for error handling, windows-services for building Windows services, windows-threading for thread pool work, windows-animation for animation manager integration, and windows-future for bridging Windows async types with Rust futures. There are also supporting crates for string types, numeric types, version detection, and raw-dylib linking. The design goal is to let Rust developers write native Windows software without managing COM interfaces by hand. The windows-bindgen crate generates all bindings automatically from Windows metadata, so the collection can stay current with the full Windows API surface as Microsoft adds new functionality. Code samples are in the repository, and a getting-started guide is linked from the README. The project is actively maintained by Microsoft.