Who
Aaron Ballman is a Principal Compiler Engineer for Intel and is the lead maintainer of the Clang open source compiler. He has two decades of experience writing cross-platform frameworks in C/C++, compiler & language design, and software engineering best practices and is currently a voting member of the C (WG14) and C++ (WG21) standards committees.
In case you can't figure it out easily enough, the views expressed here are my personal views and not the views of my employer, my past employers, my future employers, or some random person on the street. Please yell only at me if you disagree with what you read.
Category Archives: Win32
MSVC Pointer Type Attributes
One of the lesser-known features of Visual Studio’s C/C++ compiler are the pointer type attributes __ptr32 and __ptr64. More information about them can be found on MSDN. These pointer type attributes are used to control the visible size and behavior … Continue reading
Posted in C/C++, Win32
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Source Indexing SVN Repositories is Broken
Some of us spend a fair amount of time pouring through crash dumps generated on Windows. For us, the symbol server support provided by Microsoft’s debugging engines is a godsend. However, source indexing is an even bigger boon because it … Continue reading
Describing the MSVC ABI for Structure Return Types
An ABI is an “application binary interface”, which is basically a contract between pieces of executable code on how to behave. The ABI dictates things like how parameters are passed, where return values go, how to create and destroy stack … Continue reading
String Resources
On Windows, when you need to access a string resource, you turn to the LoadString API. It takes care of finding the string for you, loading it, and copying it into the buffer you supply. However, there are times when … Continue reading
An Almost Useful Language Extension
While fiddling around a bit with clang, I came across an interesting C++ language extension from Microsoft. If you’ve done library development on Windows, you’ve likely come across the __declspec keyword for things like importing and exporting symbols from a … Continue reading
How DLL Imports Work
When you make a function call into a function that exists in a DLL, what happens, exactly? How does the function call happen, and what work goes on behind the scenes to make it so? I want to cover some … Continue reading
Threading on Windows
Threads are becoming one of the more ubiquitous concepts in programming. Chances are quite good that you’ve a few of them before. But have you ever stopped to think about how a thread works under the hood? There are some … Continue reading
What Happens When You Load a Library
At this point in time, I think it’s safe to say that almost all programmers on Windows take shared libraries (DLLs) for granted. They’re this background thing that always “just works” (even if you do recall the ‘DLL hell’ days). … Continue reading
How to Check Access Rights
Given that everyone is always pushing for better security mechanisms, I’m always surprised at how incredibly difficult the simple tasks can be in the Win32 security model. At work, we have an application that wants to do the right thing … Continue reading
Calling Instance Methods in WMI
It’s pretty rare that I wind up using WMI from a C++ application, but when I’ve done so in the past, it’s been a straightforward process. The documentation in MSDN is generally adequate, and their example projects tend to lead … Continue reading
