blender.exe vs. blender-app.exe

Hello, I apologize for the stupid question but I haven’t been able to discover if and when the “blender-app.exe” should be run instead of “blender.exe” to start Blender. Could anyone who knows what the blender-app.exe is meant for explain it to me? It would be nice if it could be explained also inside the readme file that accompains the Blender software. Thank you in anticipation and happy blending.

As the blender.exe is only 475 KB in size, I would assume that the blender-app.exe is the main Blender executable and is launched anyway. My guess is that the blender.exe is a kind of application launcher that does some preliminary checks and then loads the blender-app.exe.

Thanks IkariShinji for your reply and guessing, but I think I need to read a reply from the developers to know it for sure, but thank you again.

Launching blender-app.exe directly still opens Blender, and ‘blender-app.exe’ is what is shown in task manager, regardless of how it is launched, so blender-app.exe is the actual Blender application.

Thank you @zeealpal. That’s what I’ve also noticed.

I was just curious to know if there was a specific technical reason why there are now two ways to run blender instead of only one. So, I presumed from what I read in some bugtracker posts (but I cannot remember exactly which one) that it might be a temporary solution to some kind of potential issue, but I frankly cannot recall it, that’s why I enquired the developers. Thanks again.

When the devs moved Blender windows compilation to use mscv2013, it broke the OpenMP support for windows (that makes some functions multithreaded) (while legacy mscv2008 builds were still working good with OpenMP)

This nasty problem was noticed first in a sculpt mode report in which a simple brush stroke on even very low poly stuff was pulling CPU usage to 100% (without any actual performance gain) instead of the +/- 30 CPU use.

As a solution, the devs went with a “launcher” that would apparently set some variable to lower the impact of OpenMP breakage , the discussion between dev can be read on the august mailing list "[Bf-committers] OpenMP issues with msvc2013 builds " :
http://lists.blender.org/pipermail/bf-committers/2014-August/thread.html

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Thanks for the explanation.

Yes! That was what I was referring about this patch and its relation with the MSVC2013 builds. Thank you Sanctuary, you perfectly spotted the related developers’ discussion. Cheers!

Finally, I have found the right thread/search term!
My mouse (KoneXTD) wasn’t working properly with 2.72, even when I loaded 2.72 blender.exe in its “Blender” profile - it has to point at blender-app.exe. (I run more recent versions as standalones.)