Passing WinMain parameters to another function

Question

I'm developing an application on Windows, but I'd also like to support other platforms (the majority of code I've written is platform independent). Anyway, I figured for developments sake I'd like to keep things simple (perhaps I was naive in this approach) so my main.cpp looks a little like the following:

#ifdef _WIN32
int WINAPI WinMain(HINSTANCE hInstance,
                   HINSTANCE hPrevInstance,
                   LPSTR cmdLine,
                   int cmdShow)
#else
int main(int argc, char* argv[])
#endif
{
    /* If the application is launched under Windows */
#ifdef _WIN32
    win_init wi;
    return wi.init(hInstance, hPrevInstance, cmdLine, cmdShow);
#endif

    /* If the application is launched under OS X */
#ifdef __APPLE__
    osx_init oi;
    return oi.init();
#endif
}

So the idea is that if the application is launching under Windows, WinMain is called and then I call wi.init with the WinMain arguments provided to do the rest.

I thought I was being smart, but when I compile I get an error:

MSVCRTD.lib(crtexe.obj) : error LNK2019: unresolved external symbol _main referenced in function ___tmainCRTStartup

I've researched this error and it seems to happen when people either forget a main method or try to compile a DLL as an .exe

So for my question; I am curious as to why this is happening, and what do you recommend I do instead of this approach?

Answer 1

You want to use the /SUBSYSTEM:WINDOWS linker option in order for WinMain to be used.