Glossary
Calling Convention
The agreed rules for how a function call passes arguments, returns values, and manages the stack and registers.
A calling convention is a set of rules that determine how a caller sets up a function call: which registers carry arguments, whether arguments are pushed right-to-left or left-to-right onto the stack, who cleans up the stack (caller or callee), and which registers the callee must save and restore. Common examples include cdecl (C default on x86), stdcall (Win32 API), fastcall, and the System V AMD64 ABI (Linux x86-64). Misidentifying the calling convention when reversing a binary leads to incorrect argument reconstruction in pseudocode.