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Re:A Special Kind of Hell: intmax_t in C and C++ by samatman on Saturday December 05, 2020 @03:32PM (#25318034)
ABIs are important even in the absence of proprietary binary blobs.

They allow different compiler chains to interoperate, they're the basis of FFIs, there are so many situations where I have the source to both sides of some pipe-fitting operation and having a common ABI is what makes my job possible.

Re:A Special Kind of Hell: intmax_t in C and C++ by teddyh on Saturday December 05, 2020 @05:06PM (#25318864)
ABIs are important within an architecture. But there is no good reason to stretch an ABI over too many variants of the same architecture, except to preserve compatibility with a single binary.