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

Aaron Ballman
Thu, 28 Mar 2013 19:29:52 -0000

On Thu, Mar 28, 2013 at 3:19 PM, Óscar Fuentes <ofv at wanadoo.es>
wrote:
> Eric Christopher <echristo at gmail.com> writes:
>
>> In my opinion none of these are irrelevant. Mingw and cygwin are
separate
>> ABIs that deal with some C compatibility (problems mentioned in this
thread
>> are important here too) and give you the ability to work with low level
C
>> libraries on windows, but if you want true compatibility with the full
>> platform
>> those ABIs are insufficient.
>
> What do you mean by "the full platform"? Every propietary
extension that
> MS came with along all these years? (From structured exceptions to
> whatever Windows RT requires?)
>
> 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.

~Aaron