Pedantically, C’s runtime doesn’t parse the command line arguments, CommandLineToArgvW does, and that function lives in shell32.dll, not the C runtime (Nor is i

Pedantically, C’s runtime doesn’t parse the command line arguments, CommandLineToArgvW does, and that function lives in shell32.dll, not the C runtime (Nor is it dependent on the C runtime). Ofc the C runtime is free to ignore that routine and implement parsing itself using the results from GetCommandLine. Either way though, yeah, it has to parsed in the child process. But that isn’t a huge bottleneck.