Sign Up

Sign Up to our social questions and Answers Engine to ask questions, answer people’s questions, and connect with other people.

Have an account? Sign In

Have an account? Sign In Now

Sign In

Login to our social questions & Answers Engine to ask questions answer people’s questions & connect with other people.

Sign Up Here

Forgot Password?

Don't have account, Sign Up Here

Forgot Password

Lost your password? Please enter your email address. You will receive a link and will create a new password via email.

Have an account? Sign In Now

You must login to ask a question.

Forgot Password?

Need An Account, Sign Up Here

Please briefly explain why you feel this question should be reported.

Please briefly explain why you feel this answer should be reported.

Please briefly explain why you feel this user should be reported.

Sign InSign Up

The Archive Base

The Archive Base Logo The Archive Base Logo

The Archive Base Navigation

  • Home
  • SEARCH
  • About Us
  • Blog
  • Contact Us
Search
Ask A Question

Mobile menu

Close
Ask a Question
  • Home
  • Add group
  • Groups page
  • Feed
  • User Profile
  • Communities
  • Questions
    • New Questions
    • Trending Questions
    • Must read Questions
    • Hot Questions
  • Polls
  • Tags
  • Badges
  • Buy Points
  • Users
  • Help
  • Buy Theme
  • SEARCH
Home/ Questions/Q 982977
In Process

The Archive Base Latest Questions

Editorial Team
  • 0
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

  • 0

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?

  • 1 1 Answer
  • 0 Views
  • 0 Followers
  • 0
Share
  • Facebook
  • Report

Leave an answer
Cancel reply

You must login to add an answer.

Forgot Password?

Need An Account, Sign Up Here

1 Answer

  • Voted
  • Oldest
  • Recent
  • Random
  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.

    • 0
    • Reply
    • Share
      Share
      • Share on Facebook
      • Share on Twitter
      • Share on LinkedIn
      • Share on WhatsApp
      • Report

Sidebar

Related Questions

At work we've got a roster that's historically been maintained in a huge Excel
Historically I have always written my Exception handling code like this: Cursor cursor =
In just about any formally structured set of information, you start reading either from
I just know that the GA filters can't apply to historical data, so does
Folks, I'd like to create some T4 templates for generating class files (about 7
Has SOAP exclusively used HTTP POST historically? In other words, does SOAP mainly use
Historically I've mainly written web apps in Django, but now I'm increasingly finding that
Historically I've been completely against using ORMS for all but the most basics applications.
I would like to store historical equity price data in a table in the
I've got a database of historical records from WW2 and currently each recorded event's

Explore

  • Home
  • Add group
  • Groups page
  • Communities
  • Questions
    • New Questions
    • Trending Questions
    • Must read Questions
    • Hot Questions
  • Polls
  • Tags
  • Badges
  • Users
  • Help
  • SEARCH

Footer

© 2021 The Archive Base. All Rights Reserved
With Love by The Archive Base

Insert/edit link

Enter the destination URL

Or link to existing content

    No search term specified. Showing recent items. Search or use up and down arrow keys to select an item.