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by garaetjjte 1444 days ago
>but Microsoft never considered the MSVCRT that ships with Windows to be public API

It was in the past. At first msvcrt.dll was the runtime library used up to Visual C++ 6. Later, VC++ moved to their own separate dlls, but you could still link with system msvcrt.dll using corresponding DDK/WDK up to Windows 7.

I'm also not sure that this is just ancient library left for compatibility, some system components still link to it, and msvcrt.dll itself seems to link with UCRT libraries.
2 comments
TonyTrapp 1444 days ago
> It was in the past. At first msvcrt.dll was the runtime library used up to Visual C++ 6.

At that time it was already a big mess, because at first it was the runtime library of Visual C++ 4 in fact! The gory details are here: https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20140411-00/?p=12...

> some system components still link to it

Some system components themselves are very much ancient and unmaintained and only exist for backwards compatibility as well.

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garaetjjte 1444 days ago
Ancient or not, I don't think it really matters for allocation performance: malloc in both msvcrt.dll and ucrtbase.dll after some indirection ends up calling RtlAllocateHeap in ntdll.dll
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TonyTrapp 1443 days ago
It does, because modern allocators do a lot of house keeping on top of the system heaps, e.g. to quickly reuse identically-sized memory chunks that were just freed.
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jasomill 1443 days ago
For posterity, here's a link to a version of that page with the original comments section intact:

https://web.archive.org/web/20160410051513/https://blogs.msd...

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ComputerGuru 1444 days ago
I don’t think msvcrt is exposed to link against in the DDK anymore. I maintain this, with the caveat that you really need to know what you’re doing: https://github.com/neosmart/msvcrt.lib
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