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  • “being a bit of a pain to work with” — which is one of the reasons it took so long for Windows-capable compilers to be made available by anyone else (Zortech being the first IIRC). Commented May 14, 2018 at 12:16
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    I was at Borland during the 86-87 period doing tech support for Turbo C & Turbo Basic. My memory is that getting information out of Microsoft at time was tricky. For example the format of a .LIB file wasn't documented (the Borland linker used concatenated .OBJ files IIRC) nor was the stuff required to make CodeView work. Symdeb was possible. I'd left by the time Windows 3.x arrived and I think by then MS were being a bit more open. Individuals at MS UK were great to work with we would do things like swap products with them so we didn't have to buy them. Commented May 14, 2018 at 12:55
  • Incrementing BP wasn't required, as it wasn't necessary for anything to be able to walk the stack. It's just helpful if it's possible to do this while debugging. I don't think many release versions of Windows programs actually did this because it would only hurt performance and code size. Commented May 14, 2018 at 21:14
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    I'm going from the Raymond Chen description of the way memory management works (in the linked article) and reloading discarded code segments. Please read the linked article, while Raymond might be wrong occasionally I'm pretty sure he's right. Commented May 14, 2018 at 23:18
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    Ah, it was required in 16-bit real-mode Windows code. In 16-bit protected mode Windows code (ie. almost all 16-bit Windows applications) it wasn't necessary. Note that BP wasn't incremented before far calls, instead "you must increment the bp register before you push it" in the prologue of functions that use RETF. Commented May 15, 2018 at 0:02