The Old New Thing

The history of calling conventions, part 1

January 2, 2004 Jan 2, 2004 01/2/04

Raymond Chen

The great thing about calling conventions on the x86 platform is that there are so many to choose from! In the 16-bit world, part of the calling convention was fixed by the instruction set: The BP register defaults to the SS selector, whereas the other registers default to the DS selector. So the BP register was necessarily the register used ...