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Asked: 2026-05-13T12:52:00+00:00

I understand Linux ships with a c library, which implements the ISO C functions

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I understand Linux ships with a c library, which implements the ISO C functions and system call functions, and that this library is there to be linked against when developing C. However, different c compilers do not necessarily produce linkable code (e.g. one might pad datastructures used in function arguments differently from another). How is the built-in c library meant to be linked to when I could use any compiler to compile my C? Is the story any different for static versus dynamic linking?

Under Windows on the other hand, each compiler provides its own standard library, which solves part of the problem, but system calls are still in a single set of DLLs. How are C applications linked to these DLLs successfully? How about different languages? (The same DLLs can be used by pre-.Net Visual Basic, etc.)

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  1. Editorial Team

    Each platform has some “calling conventions” that each C implementation must adhere to in order to be able to talk to the operating system correctly. For Windows, for example, all OS-based functions have to be called using stdcall convention, as opposed to the default C convention of cdecl.

    In Linux, since the standard C library (and kernel) is compiled using GCC, any other compilers for Linux must make sure their calling conventions are compatible to the one used by GCC.

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