In fact, VS's STL has to defend itself against those macros. Since the user might have already included windows.h without NOMINMAX, what we do is parenthesize all mentions of min/max, which inhibits preprocessor expansion of function-like macros. Look at our declarations of std::min()/etc.

> what we do is parenthesize all mentions of min/max

Oh! That explains some of the odd-looking code in <random>, since min and max are used as function names to determine the range of an RNG engine.

Bingo. We have a test that includes windows.h followed by all STL headers, to verify that we always remember the parens.