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That's classic "Microsoft style" and I've always hated APIs like that because they add unnecessary complexity to the code of all their callers.

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I once had the pleasure of using the Microsoft C API for creating an HMAC:

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/seccrypto/exa...

They managed to mix both patterns into a ghastly 9 function call!

The example above speaks for itself but I kind of see the "we provide you with memory you need to call 'FreeX' on" and the "call the function twice, once to find out how much memory you need to allocate" patterns to be equally annoying to use.

It’s nice if you would prefer to use a custom allocator, or put small buffers on the stack. But yeah, it is more annoying to use.

You can’t just dump ‘small’ buffers on the stack in security sensitive code; you never know how big ‘small’ can get and you have to define what happens if it’s too big anyway.

Yeah, but that is what allows Windows to keep its ABI, while extending some struct across Windows versions.

Callers allocate the right size no matter what OS version, and can only see the fields exposed on the version they were built for.

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