CMFs of the W43-MM2&MM3 subregions, plotted in their cumulative form, with shapes at the high-mass end varying from steeper than or close to the Salpeter slope of the canonical IMF (MM10, MM51 and Outskirts; light blue, yellow and green histograms of panel a) to top-heavy (MM2, MM3 and MM12; red, violet and brown histogram s of panel b). CMFs (colored histograms) are fitted by single power laws of the form N(> log (M)) ∝ M^α (lines), above the associated 990% completeness limits (left arrows and vertical lines; see Table 2) and using a bootstrapping method that use s a MLE method (see Sect. 3.1.2). The high-mass end of the canonical IMF, which has a power-law indexe of α_IMF = −1.35 (dashed imgenta lines; Salpeter 1955), is shown for comparison. The top-heavy CMF of the W43-MM2&MM3 ridge (black histogram) mostly originates from that of the MM2 subregion. The MM3 CMF is complex, being both top-heavy and bottom-light.