> Unlike Linux, Windows allows developers to choose their ABI boundary
replyLinux has a stable system call ABI. I can trash the entire user space and boot Linux with init=/my/program if I want.
It's not that Linux doesn't allow developers to choose, it's that Linux doesn't actually control the userspace ABIs. Userspace is whatever we want it to be, and people settled on "GNU/Linux".
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replyThat was introduced in Windows 10, Windows history is a long one.
replyUsually Windows developers will use Win32 directly, ZeroMemory() instead of memset(), and so on.
Indeed. I was just about to point out the fact that the CRT only provides the C standard library; Windows applications can run perfectly fine without one by linking only to the Windows API DLLs.
replyBy "system libc" I'm only referring to msvcrt.dll, found in the Windows directory. Quoting Raymond Chen:
reply> At some point, the decision was made to just give up and declare it an operating system DLL, to be used only by operating system components.
https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20140411-00/?p=12...
I think the grander point is that there is no real 'system CRT' on Windows; as I mentioned, there are multiple entry points each at an appropriate level of abstraction available to both platform and application developers (not that there is a real difference between the two, since platform developers may also write applications like Office). Many Windows platform libraries (WIL, for instance) themselves use UCRT instead of MSVCRT now. The latter exists, but it is by no means and has not ever been by any means the single entry point to the Windows platform, unlike glibc on most desktop Linux distributions.
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