You can completely skip all CRTs on Windows and still have a program that can call dynamic loader and other Win32 APIs. Here is a tutorial: https://nullprogram.com/blog/2023/02/15/
When you link with UCRT your specific program just gets a "view" of standard C functions. You can load DLLs that were linked with MSVCRT from a UCRT program. It just works
> Can't be done. The libc is legacy, it can't be changed without breaking everything... Every other OS forces a C runtime.
Windows never had this problem. If you really want it, you can actually skip CRT completely on Windows. Only thing you need is the initialization code that's statically linked anyway: https://nullprogram.com/blog/2023/02/15/ . You can still make Win32 calls with it. CRT is there as a convenience.
And since Linux distros are compiling everything from source anyway, this makes Linux a prime candidate for complete libc and complete ABI replacement. Thanks to stable kernel ABI, we can also use the same kernel even with Docker etc! Musl did it. Why can a completely modularized libc not?
Will it break a lot of programs in the userspace? YES! Hyrum's Law exists.
Will it be rejected by a significant part of user base? YES! They rejected systemd as well.
Will it take one or more decades to have something working? HELL YES! This is Linux we're talking about. Everybody has seen how Wayland played out. However, maybe if Valve has enough motivation to fix Linux binary problem, we maybe can get finally a binary-compatible distro in a decade or half a decade.
no, Windows still leaves that to the program. Usually handled by the msvc runtime for argv/argc, but the base windows API is GetCommandLine, giving you a single string.
