CODEWITHSUNDEEP
winapi
vchester
vchester

Reputation: 43

Do all applications that run on Windows use the Windows API?

I am trying to understand how code, regardless of the language, works. Specifically thinking about software that runs on Windows.

Is my understanding correct that every built in function of a particular language maps to an exposed function in the Windows API when writing software for the Windows platform?

I guess my question can be even more generally, can a language do anything outside of what the OS provides? If so, how? What is an example of this?

Upvotes: 2

Views: 1494

Answers (2)

Michael Chourdakis
Michael Chourdakis

Reputation: 11178

Yes. Even if an application exits immediately, it uses a windows call. So it is not only theoretical. In theory, as in practice, every Windows application uses the API, because there is nothing else to use.

Even if you try to rewrite each functionality you are about to use, you would eventually have to install a driver, and this also mean you would use the API.

Upvotes: 0

Sami Kuhmonen
Sami Kuhmonen

Reputation: 31183

There is a theoretical and a practical answer to this.

Practical: yes.

The WinAPI is the API everything uses to do things on Windows. It’s stable and compatible between versions so you can write whatever you want with it and it will work on practically any version of Windows given you don’t use any APIs that aren’t present in an old version. There isn’t any other interface to talk to the operating system properly.

Any language or platform that wants to work on top of this will call WinAPI. C libraries, Python, etc all are written so that they work on top of it (often other languages use C or C++ libraries which use WinAPI).

Theoretical: no.

Windows itself includes a Native API which is the actual OS interface and WinAPI is built on top of this. It is not really used if it’s not necessary since it’s not really documented. It’s used in a couple of Windows components that need to run before the other parts of the system are running and you can build applications linking to this API. But since it’s undocumented it’s not really reasonable and may change whenever.

There is also the syscall level. Several Windows components provide the lower level services for operations done on the WinAPI level. You can write, for example, an assembly program and use the syscalls directly if you want to. Mostly you don’t want to so this is more of a theoretical rather than practical answer to different platforms communicating with the OS. These also may change based on the OS.

WinAPI is basically only one subsystem that runs on the NT kernel. For example, Windows Subsystem for Linux is another one which implements its own syscalls which are then translated to Windows ones. There has also been a POSIX subsystem previously.

So all in all it depends on which level you look at it, but the practical answer is yes. Everything practically runs on WinAPI.

Upvotes: 3

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