What's in MS Visual C++ runtime library? I mean, I googled it, and I always found things like help, app xxxx gives me MS Visual C++ runtime library error, with no explanation.
I thought that Windows C runtime libraries come with Windows? Not with VC++? Thanks.
EDIT: First, thanks for answers. I thing now I have bad idea of runtime libraries in windows. I mean, the first part, that Windows internally has its win32 API and so, that's OK, I knew it. Also, that Win32API are from kernel and user parts.
But I always thought that functions like GDI are accessed as DLL (which I still believe they are). But I thought even functions like printf and so are in some windows file.
So, am I right, when I know get it that "simple" functions like printf need to be linked directly and than use only Kernel part of OS directly, and more sophisticated Windows API functions are linked as dlls, therefore ARE NOT distributed with compiler but with OS? And they subsequently access Kernel?
I mean, lets say GDI, I tell it to draw picture, it makes all the hard work in user mode and than call kernel function which puts it all in framebuffer?
And last thought, why is this even solved this way? I mean, if VC++ runtime is just layer between C and WinAPI, why cant VC++ call directly WinAPI?
A brief answer would be that the MSVS C/C++ runtime implements functions like malloc/free, stdio, iostream and some c++-stuff like dynamic_cast and exception handling. These differs between versions of visual studio, so there are different runtimes for different versions.
Windows ship mostly with a C API (the Win32 API) which rather different from the C/C++ standard library. The MSVS C/C++ runtime calls into this API to allocate memory, etc etc.
(I suppose some of the applications included with Windows are written with MSVS and in C++, so they do include the MSVS runtime for that version.)
Also, the runtime changes as new Visual Studio versions are released. A Windows release lasts much longer than that.