Question

For the fun, I want to create a (working) executable that doesn’t depend on the CRT. It wasn’t that hard after reading some articles, so I settled on:

/* test.c */
int main(){
    return 0;
}
...
/* Compiling & Linking: */
cl /c /O2 /Ox /Os test.c
link /ENTRY:main /NODEFAULTLIB /SUBSYSTEM:WINDOWS /ALIGN:16 /ignore:4108 test.obj

So far so good, but I would like to be able to call the functions of Windows API. For example, how should I link the following piece of code?:

#define UNICODE
#include <windows.h>

int main(){
    MessageBox
        (NULL, TEXT("Hello Stackoverflow!"), TEXT("Hello Stackoverflow"), MB_OK);
    return 0;
}

I read the following articles but couldn’t come up with a solution:
Minicrt, Small Programs, Tiny PE, Techniques for reducing Executable size.

Thanks in advance 🙂

Answer 1

Link against user32.lib

link /ENTRY:main /NODEFAULTLIB /SUBSYSTEM:WINDOWS /ALIGN:16 /ignore:4108 test.obj user32.lib

Look up in MSDN which library the function belongs to, and link against it.