After ignoring StackOverflow for a while, I decided to check up on it a bit lately. Someone asked a question that’s one of those kind of fundamental curiosity issues that I enjoy explaining. He said:

I always thought that functions like printf() are in the last step defined using inline assembly. That deep into stdio.h is buried some asm code that actually tells CPU what to do. Something like in dos, first mov beginning of the string to some memory location or register and than call some int. But since x64 version of Visual Studio doesn’t support inline assembler at all, it made me think that there are really no assembler-defined functions in C/C++. So, please, how is for example printf() defined in C/C++ without using assembler code? What actually executes the right software interrupt?

Obviously the answer is going to depend on the implementation. Yet I thought that with the open-sourced GNU C Library, it would be pretty straightforward to show how most of it is in C but it bottoms out at syscall. But it really was quite a maze to connect all the dots without doing any hand-waving! So I found that my explanation just kept growing until it was so long that a blog entry was a more fitting format.

So read on, fearless explorers, as we dig into the complicated answer to a seemingly simple question…

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