Calling Conventions --- __cdecl V/s __stdcall

In an earlier post I mentioned that the __stdcall calling convention reduces the code size by putting the stack clear statement just before the return statement. If this is better than __cdecl then why do we need this "__cdecl" calling convention at all??

As we know, in "__cdecl" the caller will clear the stack. This would be the ideal behavior if the callee does not know how much of stack to clear. This is absolutely the situation in case of functions with variable number of arguments. The callee will not known how many arguments it is going to receive when compiling the code and hence will not be able to put a proper stack move statement. On the other hand this info will be available with the calling function and an appropriate stack move statement can be put right after the function call instruction. This is where the "__cdecl" convention comes to rescue.

Functions with variable arguments will be qualified with "__cdecl" calling convention.