Fragile ABI

[Michel Fortin]

On 2012-08-22 06:32:29 +0000, "Paulo Pinto" <pjmlp at progtools.org> said:

> On Wednesday, 22 August 2012 at 00:15:12 UTC, David Piepgrass wrote:
>>> Lets see how the improved COM (WinRT) turns out to be.
>> 
>> Sadly, WinRT is again intended to be Windows-only, so developers like 
>> me that hate lock-in will avoid it in preference for .NET (hi Mono!) 
>> and yucky old C.
> 
> Because UNIX systems are still in the stone age in terms of ABI, as they
> barely changes since the 70's and no one seems to care enough to change things.
> 
> I like UNIX a lot, but got to know it, after knowing what is possible 
> in more advanced languages, so it always dismays me that specially when 
> dealing with most commercial UNIX it feels like being in the 70's 
> computing age.
> 
> So that lives only Apple and Microsoft with room for real OS innovation 
> in mainstream OS, and like any vendor they prefer to look for solutions 
> that fit only their OS.
> 
> Mac OS x is also UNIX, but Apple has been changing it already quite a 
> lot compared with the other vendors, hence my Apple remark.

Actually, the difference is standardization. Microsoft's COM and 
Apple's Objective-C runtime are built on top of C APIs (and you can 
access them through C if you want, although it's a little awkward). COM 
implementations and Objective-C runtime implementations exist for other 
UNIXes too, as well as other similar things, but no one is pushing them 
enough for them to become a standard.

-- 
Michel Fortin
michel.fortin at michelf.ca
http://michelf.ca/