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A comment on How to Write Portable C Without Complicating Your Build. Parent comment

Re:How to Write Portable C Without Complicating Your Build by pjmlp on Friday March 31, 2017 @04:00PM (#14007587)
You don't need POSIX at all if the language has a rich set of libraries.

In a way, I always though of POSIX as the C batteries that ANSI didn't want to make part of ANSI C, to make it easier to create compliant compilers.

Which was kind of wasted effort, because to make it easier to port code, many C compilers outside UNIX always bundled a subset of POSIX with them.

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Re:How to Write Portable C Without Complicating Your Build by bluGill on Friday March 31, 2017 @04:27PM (#14007851)
>You don't need POSIX at all if the language has a rich set of libraries.

Agreed, but that increased the cost of porting a language to the new platform. The larger (and richer) the library the more expensive it is. Unless your large library is built on a smaller internal library (like Posix).

Note that I'm arguing that C was the first to really achieve this. I'm not arguing C is the best choice, not am I arguing that the other languages couldn't have reached that. There are other languages (some better than C) that could have done just as well, but for some reason didn't.

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