Does any standard mandate name decoration?
As far as I know most (all?) conforming implementations add underscore prefix to the name of each exported symbol. Is this guaranteed by a C, POSIX or some other standard?
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The term you are looking for is [name mangling](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Name_mangling). – 500 - Internal Server Error Jun 22 '16 at 14:10
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2No, only few implementations do that. For example, almost all ELF-based targets don't add an underscore to symbols. – fuz Jun 22 '16 at 14:12
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I'm not sure about a "standard" but the prepended underscore seems to be a very common convention dating from the 1970s. From What is the reason function names are prefixed with an underscore by the compiler?:
At the time that UNIX was rewritten in C in about 1974, its authors already had extensive assember language libraries, and it was easier to mangle the names of new C and C-compatible code than to go back and fix all the existing code.
It is required for C names if you want to interoperate with the Microsoft compilers on Windows (win32 only; win64 does not use decoration since it has only a single standard calling convention).
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/cpp/build/reference/decorated-names
See also: Why do C compilers prepend underscores to external names?
Igor Skochinsky
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