Raymond Chen's blog is almost entirely dedicated to discussing aspects of the Windows API that are "oddities" to us today. And fortunately, he has a blog post that answers this exact question:
In 16-bit Windows there was a function called GetInstanceData. This
function took an HINSTANCE, a pointer, and a length, and copied memory
from that instance into your current instance. (It's sort of the
16-bit equivalent to ReadProcessMemory, with the restriction that the
second and third parameters had to be the same.)
...
This was the reason for the hPrevInstance parameter to WinMain. If
hPrevInstance was non-NULL, then it was the instance handle of a copy
of the program that is already running. You can use GetInstanceData to
copy data from it, get yourself up off the ground faster. For example,
you might want to copy the main window handle out of the previous
instance so you could communicate with it.
Whether hPrevInstance was NULL or not told you whether you were the
first copy of the program. Under 16-bit Windows, only the first
instance of a program registered its classes; second and subsequent
instances continued to use the classes that were registered by the
first instance. (Indeed, if they tried, the registration would fail
since the class already existed.) Therefore, all 16-bit Windows
programs skipped over class registration if hPrevInstance was
non-NULL.
The people who designed Win32 found themselves in a bit of a fix when
it came time to port WinMain: What to pass for hPrevInstance? The
whole module/instance thing didn't exist in Win32, after all, and
separate address spaces meant that programs that skipped over
reinitialization in the second instance would no longer work. So Win32
always passes NULL, making all programs believe that they are the
first one.
Of course, now that hPrevInstance
is irrelevant to the Windows API today except for compatibility reasons, MSDN recommends that you use a mutex to detect previous instances of an application.
A mutex stands for "mutual exclusion". You can refer to the MSDN documentation for CreateMutex()
. There are lots of examples of using mutexes to detect previous instances of applications, such as this one. The basic idea is to create a mutex with a unique name that you come up with, then attempt to create that named mutex. If CreateMutex()
failed with ERROR_ALREADY_EXISTS
, you know that an instance of your application was already launched.