Kevin De Baerdemaeker

Handmade Hero - Intro to C on Windows

Modified 2023-09-07

Day 1

Details of WinMain - 57:23

Windows calls the C Runtime Library (which comes shipped with all the C compilers) and the CRT calls WinMain, which is the default entry point to execute the GUI application. Console applications have main as their entry point. 

#include <windows.h>

int CALLBACK WinMain(
  HINSTANCE hInstance,
  HINSTANCE hPrevInstance,
  LPSTR     lpCmdLine,
  int       nCmdShow)
{
  OutputDebugStringA("Some function\n");
  return 0;
};

Day 2

Debuggers

The best debugger for Linux seems to be the gdb -tui debugger, but I prefer to use the gf gdb frontend as it's easier to set the breakpoints and see the context in code.

Day 3

Speed of light / processor speed = how far the light travels with each cpu tick. So, in general the light can't even travel from the CPU to RAM, and back within a cpu tick.

The latency is reduced by providing small caches inside the CPU, while the bandwidth is sending as much stuff down the wire, which is easier to improve.

Day 4

The compiler is not constraint to lay each of the fields as compact as possible. A char might be respresented by 4 bytes if the processor if it's optimized to access values on 4 bytes boundaries (as it might be slower to access a single byte).

Day 5

Metadata

Creator(s)

Casey Muratori

  • Source
    • Recommended By

    Dennis Present

    Reason

    I'm interested in understanding how game engines and games work from scratch and I have zero experience with C, so this was the bare minimum of C I would need to follow along with the regular videos.

    Backlinks