On Thursday, 25 May 2017 at 15:36:38 UTC, Jason King wrote:
Yes it is a lot of work, which I strongly suspect is a big
reason why C still reigns supreme at the systems level —
because it does have a stable ABI which solves a lot of
headaches from a systems point of view (obviously momentum and
history are also very big reasons).
That is a common misconception.
C only has a stable ABI on operating systems written in C,
because the C ABI is actually the OS ABI.
In operating systems not written in C, like all the mainframe
OSes before C got widespread out of UNIX and still in use
nowadays (IBM i, z/OS, ClearPath), real time OSes written in Ada
and quite a few other examples, the "C ABI" only has a meaning
inside the POSIX emulation environment.
In fact, during the 80 and 90's it was common not being able to
link object files from different C compilers on home OSes that
were actually mostly written in Assembly.
--
Paulo
