alt Hacker NewsFrom literally any language. The WriteFile function comes from kernel32.dll shared library, and follows the certain calling convention. You don't need to use this calling convention inside your own binary (and indeed, MinGW and MSYS use SysV ABI for everything except when calling Win32 API), or ask a random C runtime coming from God knows where to do this for you if you write something other than C.
In the UNIX world there is this strange notion that C language is somehow special and that the OS itself should provide its runtime (a single global version of it) for every program, even those written in other languages, to interact with the OS but... it's just silly.
> Does windows really offer no API for writing text (rather than bytes) to files? Or does it rely on the application developer to manage line endings in their own code? Neither of those sounds very developer-friendly.
No it doesn't. That logic belongs in the OS-specific layer in the runtimes/standard libraries of the implementations of the different programming languages. They may decide to re-use each other libraries, of course, or they may decide not to.
> You don't need to use this calling convention inside your own binary (and indeed, MinGW and MSYS use SysV ABI for everything except when calling Win32 API), or ask a random C runtime coming from God knows where to do this for you if you write something other than C.
Well sure but you have to define it somewhere. At some point there's an interface where something that's part of the application asks something that's part of the OS to do something, and that interface had better be stable and well-specified. If you really want you can use a different interface from your C ABI, sure, but given that, like it or not, most of windows is written in C (or in C++ but using C linkage between component boundaries), what do you gain?