Re: [TUHS] where did "main" come from?

On 22 May 2020 14:43 -0400, from stewart(a)serissa.com (Lawrence Stewart): I don't have a ready answer to your question where that name came from, but it's worth remembering (and easy to forget) that main() isn't the actual starting point of execution of a C program. Rather, the starting point is a function within the C library, which does some early setup work and then ultimately calls main() and takes care of passing the return value from main() back to the operating system (see [1] for Linux, for example). This is perhaps most obvious in C programs for Microsoft Windows, which don't have the traditional main() but do have a WinMain() in its place. It looks like at least glibc uses _start as the actual entry point [2]. In turn, on x86-64 (and very likely also on other architectures), that calls __libc_start_main(), which in turn calls main() via a function pointer passed to it. [1]: https://refspecs.linuxbase.org/LSB_3.1.0/LSB-generic/LSB-generic/baselib---… [2]: https://blogs.oracle.com/linux/hello-from-a-libc-free-world-part-1-v2 -- Michael Kjörling • https://michael.kjorling.se • michael(a)kjorling.se “Remember when, on the Internet, nobody cared that you were a dog?”