&gt; I&#x27;d love Microsoft to be a bit more open about what their C runtime actually does before a program linked to it loads. Of course, perhaps they are, and I&#x27;ve missed it.<p>The source code to the CRT ships with Visual Studio.<p>&gt; Basically, the entrypoint for Win32 isn&#x27;t actually WinMain, but WinMainCRTStartup.<p>The entry point is whatever appears in the PE header and you can name it whatever you want. It just so happens that the default linker settings point it at CRT, which calls into you. You can change this with linker settings.