alt Hacker News> 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?
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> 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.
It's defined, and well-specified.
> your C ABI
Which is a C ABI. Borland's Turbo C and C++Builder used different ABI than Microsoft C compiler did. GCC for Windows used to use a third, entirely different ABI as well. The ABI is not part of the language definition, you see.
> most of windows is written in C
And compiled with a very specific C compiler that used a particular ABI. That only means that you need to follow it when you call into the OS, sure, but not that you have to stick to it anywhere else — and indeed, most implementations of many programming languages on Windows didn't; they invented and used their own ABIs.
Even so, most of Windows historically did not use C ABI, but rather stdcall, so specifying a call from your C library to the Windows C library couldn’t be done in a purely standards-compliant C compiler (which doesn’t have calling convention modifiers), in a slightly pedantic quirk of the C spec design