richard engebretson

Perhaps learning what unix and linux offers is worth your time. AFAIK,
win32 mostly IS a VCL.

Win32 (protected mode) has changed many times in the 10 years it has
existed. To use protected mode you need the operating system API.
Microsoft makes a lot of money having a proprietary API.

Linux takes forever to learn. But an enormous number of programming
languages exist;
shells(bash, tcsh, zsh, tcl, perl, gawk, python ...) ,
compilers(assembly, C*, ada, fortran, pascal, basic, java ...),
VCL(ncurses, qt, motif, tk, gnome, direct_framebuffer ...) .

The problem is knowing what you want. I like pascal because I can read
it. Old Nick Wirth knew what he was doing.