Comment by cyberax
5 days ago
This approach was used in the ATL/WTL (Active Template Library, Windows Template Library) in the early 2000-s. It was a bad idea, because you need to generate executable code, interfering with NX-bit memory protection.
Windows actually had a workaround in its NX-bit implementation that recognized the byte patterns of these trampolines from the fault handler: https://web.archive.org/web/20090123222148/http://support.mi...
I'm genuinely surprised Microsoft's attitude towards "wndprocs don't have a context pointer" was "let's JIT compile a trampoline to hold the context pointer" and not to add support for a five-parameter wndproc into USER.dll, or have a wrapper that grabs GWLP_USERDATA and copies it to the register this lives in.
> I'm genuinely surprised Microsoft's attitude towards "wndprocs don't have a context pointer"
They designed windows classes to be reusable, and assumed many developers going to reuse windows classes across windows.
Consider the following use case. Programmer creates a window class for a custom control, registers the class. Designs a dialog template with multiple of these custom controls in a single dialog. Then creates the dialog by calling DialogBoxW or similar.
These custom controls are created automatically multiple at once, hard to provide context pointers for each control.
Doesn't x32 only have four registers available in the calling convention, AX-DX?
The stdcall calling convention used APIs and API callbacks on Windows x86 doesn't use registers at all, all parameters are passed on the stack. MSVC does support thiscall/fastcall/vectorcall conventions that pass some values in registers, but the system APIs and COM interfaces all use stdcall.
Windows x64 and ARM64 do use register passing, with 4 registers for x64 (rcx/rdx/r8/r9) and 8 registers for ARM64 (x0-x7). Passing an additional parameter on the stack would be cheap compared to the workarounds that everyone has to do now.
The x32 ABI uses the same fastcall convention as the regular x86-64 ABI. It's mostly syscall numbers that are affected by the shrunk pointers.
It was also used by Delphi in 90s.