[LLVMdev] [cfe-dev] Handling SRet on Windows x86

Óscar Fuentes
Thu, 28 Mar 2013 20:18:33 -0000

Aaron Ballman <aaron at aaronballman.com> writes:

>> MinGW is very well capable of using the Win32 API. There is partial or
>> non-existent support for extensions such as COM, but those are not part
>> of the "ABI", for sure.
>
> COM is not part of the Windows ABI?  That's news to me, given that
> there are hundreds (thousands?) of powerful APIs exposed *only* via
> COM, which are documented and supported by Microsoft.  This may or may
> not be outside of the realm of the current discussion, but I would
> hate to see all the functionality exposed via COM to be tossed aside
> with the mistaken belief it's not part of the Windows ecosystem we
> need to support.

COM is a language extension. You could say the same thing about .Net.

OTOH, I doubt there is any kind of project that you can't do on Windows
because you can't use COM (apart from interfacing with certain
applications, distributed with the OS or not.)