High Quality Content by WIKIPEDIA articles! Microsoft Visual C++ Name Mangling is a mangling (decoration) scheme used in Microsoft Visual C++ series of compilers. It provides a way of encoding name and additional information about a function, structure, class or another datatype in order to pass more semantic information from the Microsoft Visual C++ compiler to its linker. Visual Studio and the Windows SDK (which includes the command line compilers) come with the program undname which may be invoked to obtain the C-style function prototype encoded in a mangled name. The information below has been mostly reverse-engineered. There is no official documentation for the actual algorithm used.