Calling Convention – Part II (__stdcall)

Make sure you have read “Calling Convention – Part I” of this article.

Standard calling convention ( __stdcall )

This convention is usually used to call Win32 API functions.

Note: WINAPI is nothing but another name for__stdcall:

#define WINAPI __stdcall

We can explicitly declare a function to use the __stdcall convention:

int __stdcall Add( int nValue1, int nValue2 );

The main characteristics of __stdcall calling convention are:

1. Arguments are passed from right to left, and placed on the stack.
2. Stack cleanup is performed by the called function.

Function Name Decoration For stdcall

Function name is decorated by prefixing an underscore character ‘_’ and postfixing a ‘@’ character and number of bytes of stack space required by the arguments at end of the function name.

_Add@8 //underscore before function name & @ and number of bytes space required on stack

Now, take a look at an example of a __stdcall call:

; // push arguments to the stack, from right to left
push 3
push 2
; // call the function
call _Add@8
; // copy the return value from EAX to a local variable (int nResult)
mov DWORD PTR [nResult], eax

The called function is shown below:

; // function prolog
push ebp
mov ebp, esp
push ebx
push esi
push edi
; // return nValue1 + nValue2;
mov eax, DWORD PTR [nValue1]
add eax, DWORD PTR [nValue2]
; // function epilog
pop ebx
pop esi
pop edi
mov esp, ebp
pop ebp
;//Stack cleanup and return
ret 8

Conclusion

__stdcall is default calling convention for Win32 API’s.

Advantage

Advantage of __stdcall calling convention is that it creates smaller executables than __cdecl, in which the code for stack cleanup will be cleaned by called function.

Disadvantage

Disadvantage of __stdcall calling convention is that functions with variable number of arguments (like printf())  can’t use __stdcall. Instead they must use __cdecl, because it is the only calling convention who knows the number of arguments in each function call; therefore only the caller can perform the stack cleanup.

Cont. Calling Convention – Part III