Not just in Visual Studio. main is usually (always?) not the entry point on unixoid systems either, that's much more likely to be _start, which calls main() dow

Not just in Visual Studio. main is usually (always?) not the entry point on unixoid systems either, that's much more likely to be _start, which calls main() down the line. Nevertheless, main is treated specially by the compiler for the aforementioned historical reasons, for example to not warn/error out if it does not return a value despite the type clearly telling so. Observe: % echo 'int main(void) { }' > foo.c; clang -c foo.c <no output> % echo 'int foo(void) { }' > foo.c; clang -c foo.c foo.c:1:17: warning: non-void function does not return a value [-Wreturn-type] int foo(void) { } ^ 1 warning generated. As you can see, clang is happy to ignore the missing return value for main(), but not for foo().