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Home/ Questions/Q 982977
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Editorial Team
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Editorial Team
Asked: May 16, 20262026-05-16T04:46:58+00:00 2026-05-16T04:46:58+00:00

Historically, why does it seem like just about everyone and their kid brother defined

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Historically, why does it seem like just about everyone and their kid brother defined their own calling conventions? You’ve got C, C++, Windows, Pascal, Fortran, Fastcall and probably a zillion others I didn’t think to mention. Shouldn’t one convention be the most efficient for the vast majority of use cases? Is there ever any good reason to prefer one over the other?

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  1. Editorial Team
    Editorial Team
    2026-05-16T04:46:59+00:00Added an answer on May 16, 2026 at 4:46 am

    The calling conventions you mention were designed over the course of decades for different languages and different hardware. They all had different goals. cdecl supported variable arguments for printf. stdcall resulted in smaller code gen, but no variable arguments. Fastcall could greatly speed up the performance of simple functions with only one or two arguments on older machines (but is rarely a speed up today.)

    Note than when x64 was introduced, on Windows at least, it was designed to have a single calling convention.

    Raymond Chen wrote a great series on the history of calling conventions, you can start here.

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