11–20 of 98 posts
The discussion in the comments is interesting. MinGW, the compiler for VLC, LibreOffice and most other FOSS projects on Windows does exactly what Raymond says not to do. In fact, the entire purpose of MinGW is to make GCC able to target msvcrt.dll. Developers and users love this, since they don't have to distribute and install the CRT with the program. Developers following the GPL aren't even allowed to distribute th…
Sorry, but I'm not going to link to a huge convoluted mess of variously versioned DLLs just to get standard C library functions. Maybe the situation is different with C++ (probably due to no real ABI standard), but the C library functions shouldn't change since they were standardised. If an application breaks because the internals of a library were changed, that's none other than the applications' fault.
"If an application breaks because the internals of a library were changed, that's none other than the applications' fault." I agree 100%, it's certainly the application's fault, but Microsoft has some very large corporate customers that it wants to keep happy, so in some cases it will eat the cost of cleaning up after sloppy developers. I don't work for Microsoft, but the company I work for (we write expensive enterp…
I don't want an installer, nor to include the redistributable which is around 2 orders of magnitude larger than the application itself! I want a single tiny binary, just download and run on any system, and that's what using MSVCRT allows.
It's not that I like the MSVCRT runtime. It's just that I have to target it. Any popular commercial product that has some form of plugin architecture (Autodesk for example) through DLLs would require more or less for one to compile it's own plugins with the exact version the main application was compiled.
It's a bit of strange moment - when one developer cries that OpenSSL should've not used it's own malloc implementation, and then another cries - don't expose malloc/free interface (but do say your_api_malloc, your_api_free) and this way you can target any "C" runtime.
Now these are completely two different things, but not so much. What if say OpenSSL used the "malloc" runtime - what version of MSVCRT.DLL would've they target? Does anyone really expect to target all these different versions and all these different compilers that you can't even find the free versions now through MSDN?
(Now I'm ignoring the fact that you can't easily hook malloc and replace it with "clear-zero" after alloc function, but that's just a detail).
What I'm getting is that there are too many C runtimes, hell DirectX was better!
I only wished MS actually somehow made MSVCRT.DLL the one and only DLL for "C" (C++ would be much harder, but it's doable).
A lot of 'real' ( cough ) hackers like to look down at MS, but Raymond Chen is one of those guys I'd hate to get into a technical argument with: he has experience, is extremely sharp, and very sarcastic. Those three attributes make Old New Thing my favorite MS blog even if I don't write Win32 anymore. If anything, Windows' level of backward compatibility is a giant cautionary tale: enable poor behavior from devs, and…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
"If an application breaks because the internals of a library were changed, that's none other than the applications' fault." I agree 100%, it's certainly the application's fault, but Microsoft has some very large corporate customers that it wants to keep happy, so in some cases it will eat the cost of cleaning up after sloppy developers. I don't work for Microsoft, but the company I work for (we write expensive enterp…
> and your application's installer installs the redistributable DLL for that version I don't want an installer, nor to include the redistributable which is around 2 orders of magnitude larger than the application itself! I want a single tiny binary, just download and run on any system, and that's what using MSVCRT allows.
A lot of 'real' ( cough ) hackers like to look down at MS, but Raymond Chen is one of those guys I'd hate to get into a technical argument with: he has experience, is extremely sharp, and very sarcastic. Those three attributes make Old New Thing my favorite MS blog even if I don't write Win32 anymore. If anything, Windows' level of backward compatibility is a giant cautionary tale: enable poor behavior from devs, and…
Personally I think OSes need to evolve toward a model where apps are more strictly containerized, something like Docker (Linux) but for everything. The user should still be able to admin their own machine, but this permission should be forbidden to apps without explicit user approval (and a big red warning).
Why can't Windows officially include standard versions of this library? You know, like Windows already does with .NET versions since Vista or every other OS does with libstc++ or libc++? Forcing every C/C++ program to bundle their own MSVCRTXX.dll is pretty silly.
It also seems to paradoxically improve load times. Shrug.