Thread: Windows vs. Standard

Hey guys, I was looking at some code in a tutorial, and I noticed that it used these functions:

ReadFile(HANDLE, LPVOID, DWORD, LPDWORD, LPOVERLAPPED)
CopyMemory(PVOID, const VOID*, DWORD)

I also noticed that there are these equivalent standard(?) functions:

ifstream::read(char*, int)
memcpy(void*, const void*, size_t)

Can someone tell me what advantages there would be in using the former Windows functions instead of the latter standard functions?

You get slightly better performance from the windows api functions but for it you give up portability. iostreams are portable. Win32 api to a large extent isnt.

Oh, I see. Thanks for your explanation, I was thinking it would be something along those lines but I wasn't sure. Heh well, portability isn't too much of an issue since this is a DirectX app anyways

Originally posted by Stoned_Coder
You get slightly better performance from the windows api functions but for it you give up portability. iostreams are portable. Win32 api to a large extent isnt.

It's not as clean cut as that...some APIs map to std C funcs (as Wledge pointed out).

msvcrt.dll ( and it's updates) export std c funcs like fgets, fopen, malloc, memcopy...etc...and functions like ZeroMemory wrap around these.

Windows also exports some of these functions in another form to drivers running in kernel mode (wledge's example)....

Hm, ok. But if portability has already been compromised anyways, you can't go wrong with using the Windows API functions, right?