Whats the point of WinMain()?

[sergent]

What is the difference between standard, int main(int nargs,....); and

int WINAPI WinMain(
  HINSTANCE hInstance, 
  HINSTANCE hPrevInstance, 
  LPWSTR lpCmdLine, 
  int nShowCmd 
);

I am making a cross-platform program, for windows and linux, and until this point, I used main, without WinMain, for windows and linux. My app calls windows and Linux-specific functions but I still use normal main(). Do I need WinMain() if I want to make windows GUI instead of command prompt? Sorry, I am not an expert in Windows programming.

[mrnutty]

Maybe someone will correct me, but I believe its just convention. But WinMain does have extra parameter options than int main() which might become useful. But a thing to note is that returning in WinMain really doesn't do much since its returned value is passed to ExitThread instead of ExitProcess.

[Ketsuekiame]

It is the entry point for Win32 applications (not console). If you're doing cross platform, you will need to check the definitions to see which OS you're compiling for and use some #ifdef pre-processor statements to include the correct entry point.

[mike_2000_17]

I believe that the difference is that Windows actually makes a difference between programs that run as a console application (MSDOS) and programs that run in the Windows system (Win32). If you try to run a program that uses WinMain() from a console window, you will probably get the message "This program cannot run in console." (at least, on older versions of windows that still had a native MSDOS environment available, newer versions only emulate the MSDOS environment via the "command prompt"). In Linux, and other *nix environments, all programs run in the terminal (whether you see it or not), and the GUI environment is nothing more than an external library invoked by the program.

But I might be wrong, it has been a while since I implemented any GUI app for windows, but I don't remember ever doing it without a WinMain function as entry-point. Also note that many cross-platform GUI libraries will hide away the entry-point function and provide you with a secondary function that acts as the entry-point for your purposes (which is usually invoked after the basic setup of the GUI application have been done).

[sergent]

Ok, thanks guys. I decided to use winmain for my project, so I have something likes this

#define linux
//#define windows

int realmain() {
//real work for the program goes here
}

int main() {
return realmain();
}

int WINAPI WinMain(
  HINSTANCE hInstance, 
  HINSTANCE hPrevInstance, 
  LPWSTR lpCmdLine, 
  int nShowCmd 
) {
return realmain();
}

[mike_2000_17]

You don't need those #defines for linux and windows. There are a number of "standard" preprocessor defines which can tell you for what OS and compiler the code is being compiled for/with, in addition to a lot of other things (like C++0x support, multi-threading stuff, etc.). Here is a list for discriminating between the OS.

For example, you could just do:

int realmain() {
  //real work for the program goes here
}

#ifdef _WIN32
int WINAPI WinMain(
  HINSTANCE hInstance, 
  HINSTANCE hPrevInstance, 
  LPWSTR lpCmdLine, 
  int nShowCmd 
) {
#else
int main() {
#endif
  return realmain();
}

[jmichae3]

What is the difference between standard, int main(int nargs,....); and

int WINAPI WinMain(
  HINSTANCE hInstance, 
  HINSTANCE hPrevInstance, 
  LPWSTR lpCmdLine, 
  int nShowCmd 
);

I am making a cross-platform program, for windows and linux, and until this point, I used main, without WinMain, for windows and linux. My app calls windows and Linux-specific functions but I still use normal main(). Do I need WinMain() if I want to make windows GUI instead of command prompt? Sorry, I am not an expert in Windows programming.

first, when you compile a commandline console app, you compile without anything special. with a windows GUI app which requires WinMain(), in mingw and mingw-w64 you must compile with the -windows switch. not sure, but I think this makes a different kind of exe,a Windows PE exe. main() will be totally ignored, at this point, you are using WinMain().

the lpCmdLine must be parsed using a win32 function call, which returns a UNICODE string. unfortunately, UNICODE is not really supported by C++ at this time, and it's not well supported by C either. windows uses 16-bit unicode.

oh, and the definition for WinMain() changes almost daily. I noticed your definition is different than the one I was using for my code (LPWSTR instead of LPSTR, probably a correction). you can try using ustring from sf.net.