Not everything has a convenient wrapper, just the high profile stuff like files and GUIs. Are there wrappers for things like dlopen()? posix_madvise? All the various set... functions? Filesystem ACLs? COM objects?
(I'm something of an outlier here, maintaining a big legacy MFC application that targets Windows CE, but I can't be the only one. One implication of this is that I'm using the Microsoft MIPS compiler with this banner, that's probably older than some of the readers here and certainly predates C99:
Microsoft (R) 32-bit C/C++ Optimizing Compiler Version 12.00.8804 for 80x86
Copyright (C) Microsoft Corp 1984-1998. All rights reserved.
... but my point is that it's not sensible to say nobody's using the system native APIs in 2017!)
> I'm something of an outlier here, maintaining a big legacy MFC application that targets Windows CE, but I can't be the only one.
The problem is not developing "legacy" apps, it's comparing the development and maintenance of "legacy" apps with apps that just get started being written today, for which the bare minimum is being cross-platform.
> Are there wrappers for things like dlopen()? posix_madvise?
none that I know of :( though MS has a fairly decent "modern C++" API that covers WinRT: https://github.com/Microsoft/cppwinrt but I don't think ACLs are even available in WinRT
> Boost do seem to be aiming for complete wrapper coverage.
I don't think "boost" is aiming at anything. If you have a good idea of a library (and a good implementation!) you can submit it to boost. It's more a big repository of libraries with a somewhat consistent coding style.
(I'm something of an outlier here, maintaining a big legacy MFC application that targets Windows CE, but I can't be the only one. One implication of this is that I'm using the Microsoft MIPS compiler with this banner, that's probably older than some of the readers here and certainly predates C99:
... but my point is that it's not sensible to say nobody's using the system native APIs in 2017!)