This is a dumb question, but I'm sorry I cannot find this information in the online manual of the function. I came from Linux realm. I'm not familiar with convention in Windows world.

All examples I found use smart pointer, e.g. wil::com_ptr, but GCC obviously doesn't provide those tools. Shall I call Release on the return value? Or leave it alone? Thanks.

CodePudding user response：

IStream is built on top of the classic COM IUnknown interface, and as such any pointer returned from a function has IUnknown::AddRef called on it and you must call IUnknown::Release when you're done or you'll leak memory.

GCC obviously doesn't provide those tools

Just in case you needed a reason to use cl on Windows and the Windows SDK, you found it.