A Universal I/O Abstraction for C++ (2020)

Re:A Universal I/O Abstraction for C++ (2020) by pjmlp on Monday April 19, 2021 @09:04AM (#26862284)

So easy that to actually make C portable, UNIX had to be made into a C standard library via POSIX, otherwise portable C code is basically just logic and data structures.

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Re:A Universal I/O Abstraction for C++ (2020) by refenestrator on Monday April 19, 2021 @09:11AM (#26862353)

Sure, but the flipside of that is that UNIX itself is fairly easy to port to a new CPU, due to being mostly written in C.

So port your compiler, figure out a syscall interface on your CPU, patch it into unix/libc and compile them, and.. it's not like that's a small amount of work but it's way easier than bootstrapping any other environment from scratch on a new architecture.

There's surely some amount of historical accident here as well, but no other language/OS combo ran on like 12 different architectures in the 80s.

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Re:A Universal I/O Abstraction for C++ (2020) by pjmlp on Monday April 19, 2021 @11:04AM (#26863499)

Because no other timesharing OS was available in free beer source code for others to port it, it had nothing to do with C.

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