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WinAPI is focused primarily on the C family, but how do new programming languages use those features without creating their own runtime/interpreter type thing? Do they hook directly into the DLL files? kernel32.dll contains most of those functions right?

Thanks.

asked Sep 1, 2014 at 19:03

1 Answer 1

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Every language (even C!) has some kind of runtime. This runtime will usually provide bindings to C or have an API usable from C (or in the case of C: from assembler). Such C bindings can then be used to access libraries written for C. There will usually be a translation layer that converts between different data representations in C and in the target language.

answered Sep 1, 2014 at 19:21
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    @Jake for more information, please see these Wikipedia articles: Foreign Function Interface, Language Binding. Commented Sep 1, 2014 at 21:13
  • The "Foreign Function Interface" is exactly what I was looking for, thank you! Commented Sep 3, 2014 at 14:50

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