Warning, ABI breakage from 2.074 to 2.075
Paulo Pinto via Digitalmars-d
digitalmars-d at puremagic.com
Thu May 25 09:32:02 PDT 2017
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
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