Creating an “invisible” windows program in C/C++

Question

Ok this is a continuation from this question: How to make a simple Hello World "invisible" in Windows (C/C++)

People gave me some guidance and here I am with a new qestion:

Aight after doing some research I am stuck again. People on the internet claim that by just creating a win32 application there will be no graphical indications.

Here is the code that does this (I'm pretty sure you already know this but w/e)

int WINAPI WinMain(HINSTANCE hInstance, HINSTANCE hPrevInstance,
LPSTR lpCmdLine, int nCmdShow) {

//code
return 0;
}

So the code typed inside main is not displayed. I don't really get what kind of code they mean but for example:

#include <windows.h>

int WINAPI WinMain(HINSTANCE hInstance, HINSTANCE hPrevInstance,
LPSTR lpCmdLine, int nCmdShow) {

    while (1) {
    }
}

This program pops a Cmd window just fine.

I've also found that by initializing values at the STARTUPINFO structure like that

STARTUPINFO StartupInfo;
memset(&StartupInfo, 0, sizeof(StartupInfo));
// set the size of the structure
StartupInfo.cb = sizeof(STARTUPINFO);
// tell the application that we are setting the window display 
// information within this structure
StartupInfo.dwFlags = STARTF_USESHOWWINDOW;
// set the window display to HIDE
StartupInfo.wShowWindow = SW_HIDE;

would hide the console window. This doesn't work either for me though. I have this feeling that I am missing a major concept here so I need your knowledge guys. I want to create simple .exe with something like a while loop or a simple print that doesn't display a thing. What am I missing?

Answer 1

You have to use a specific compiler option to do this; it's not a property of the code itself. I will assume you are using Visual Studio to compile.

Go to Project Properties > Configuration Properties > Linker > System > SubSystem and set it to Windows . If you do this and run your program and, for example, put your program into an infinite loop, you'll have to kill it from the Task Manager.

I have no idea how to do this on GCC. Gerald has told me in the comments that using --subsystem,windows or -mwindows will do this for GCC. Note that -mwindows links the GDI libraries as well.