26 Feb
2012
26 Feb
'12
12:45 a.m.
On 2/22/2012 11:30 PM, Greg 'groggy' Lehey wrote:
On Thursday, 23 February 2012 at 8:22:17 +1100, Dave
Horsfall wrote:
Yes and no. IIRC, gcc doesn't do that on, for example, Linux ELF. it's
done on windows, I assume, in deference to the windows 32-bit ABI for
cdecl calling convention functions.
Now, as far as where windows gets that from (just because something
evolved within one company doesn't mean it didn't evolve), supposedly
early versions of Microsoft C (pre-ANSI) were very conservative in terms
of adhering to the "standard" set by Unix C and K&R - this could have
extended to the prepending of underscores. For instance, this is,
according to Raymond Chen, why they added WinMain rather than extending
main (they didn't know if extensions to main would be allowed). I would
also guess it's why MSVC stdio is implemented on top of an imitation of
Unix system calls which is in turn implemented on top of DOS/windows;
and why MSVC time_t is defined as seconds since 1970. There are comments
in the code referring to XENIX in various places relating to I/O and
timestamps, so it's possible that MSVC's C library was indeed, to some
small degree, based on Unix.
On Wed, 22 Feb 2012, arnold(a)skeeve.com wrote:
I'm no friend
of Microsoft either, but gcc isn't exactly Microsoft.
What Arnold mentions here is Unix history in action.
It also shows the consequences a small,
apparently local decision
can have: here we are 40+ years later and GCC on Windows is still
preprending underscores to function names!
When it comes to Windoze, nothing
surprises me any more. Unix has
evolved over the years, but Windoze was spat out and hatched.