A library is not a framework. You can write framework-free apps while using libraries (in fact, most do - not wanting to be burdened with a framework doesn't mean you have to write all functionality yourself).

A framework is either about inversion of control (it calls your code, e.g. you write web request controller logic, and it sets up the infrastructure for calling your controllers), and/or a set of ways to structure your code, like classes to extend, folder structure, a set of patterns you must follow to work with it, like a specific MVC-like organization of code, and so on.

Well to be pedantic, the CRT invokes a callback called 'main' with preprocessed (command line) parameters, in the 'main callback' you're expected to do something with the parameters that have been passed to you (for instance read data from stdin, process it and write back to stdout), and then return from the 'main callback' with a success or failure code.

Ok, I'm throwing together the CRT and standard lib here, but in the end both are parts of the "UNIX command line tools framework" which is supposed to provide a programming environment to easily extend the UNIX shell with your own commands.

Yes, in the same sense that "all program are just permutations of 0 and 1 in the end".

Similarly, "libc is the same as a framework" is not an abstraction/assumption at any meaningful level, or really pertinent to the discussion.

By this definition everything is a framework. You're never the one calling code, it's always the BIOS, the bootloader, the kernel program loader, etc. I don't want to go all ad-reductio, but this is one of the points I have against the anti-framework people: the code you write is actually a pretty small percentage of the total code that makes up your system/application. Good engineering is working to make sure that code is differentiating code, not irrelevant code like garbage collection, HTTP header parsing, etc.

> You're never the one calling code, it's always the BIOS, the bootloader, the kernel program loader, etc. I don't want to go all ad-reductio

I don't think you're even being reductive; it's just irrelevant. The saying is to do with the software you're writing right now - do you include a framework (e.g. Django, Ruby on Rails, Spring) or do you include libraries that you could swap out (e.g. Flask - which terms itself a "micro framework", but is a library for this definition, ReactJS, SQLAlchemy) and your code is in control. You're right that the code will run on one or more operating systems, but abstracting out that far elides the useful conversation application developers can have about eggs and baskets.

> the code you write is actually a pretty small percentage of the total code that makes up your system/application

This is almost always true, but seems again irrelevant. How I write my application is worthy of discussion in and of itself, if for no other reason than, with a few exceptions, I'll spend a lot more time and money on making my application than I will thinking about how the Linux kernel works.

> The saying is to do with the software you're writing right now - do you include a framework (e.g. Django, Ruby on Rails, Spring) or do you include libraries that you could swap out (e.g. Flask - which terms itself a "micro framework", but is a library for this definition, ReactJS, SQLAlchemy) and your code is in control.

I'd say by this definition (your code calls a library, a framework calls your code), Flask is every bit as much a framework as Django; I write functions that are called by the router just like I do for Django views. Sure, I can swap out the ORM and the templating library; I might even be able to swap out the routing library, but here be dragons. But a standard Flask application and a standard Django application are very similar. And if I wrote an application using Flask, it would be more or less a rewrite to swap in something else for Flask, because I'd be depending on Flask's request and response objects, at minimum.

This is partly why I don't think this definition is very useful, too. Clearly Django and Flask are different, but this isn't why.

> I don't think you're even being reductive; it's just irrelevant.

The arguments here are:

"With libraries you call the code; with frameworks they call your code"

"This isn't a good distinction because there are lots of things we wouldn't consider frameworks that call your code"

That seems relevant to me.

> I'll spend a lot more time and money on making my application than I will thinking about how the Linux kernel works.

That means the kernel is doing its job, and if you swap out "Linux kernel" with "Django", that would also mean Django is doing its job. Without the kernel, you'd have to do a lot more work talking to hardware and scheduling other processes to run. Without Django, you'd have to do a lot more work wrangling HTTP and SQL.

It feels like peoples' issue with frameworks are that they force a way of thinking on you. But everything in software does that, the semantics of processes, pages, threads and so on are entirely made up, just like model view controller is.

>I don't want to go all ad-reductio, but this is one of the points I have against the anti-framework people: the code you write is actually a pretty small percentage of the total code that makes up your system/application

Which is neither here, nor there.

We're talking about a specific kind of inversion of control and forced structure within the codebase.

Else we could just go down an irrelevant rabbit hole, and it would like being a lawyer in a criminal case and arguing that your client is innocent, because "ultimately everything, including the murder, is just deterministic after-effects caused by the Big Bang".

Well, my point is that because this applies to more or less everything, it's not a great determinant of library vs. framework.

Like, the way you use Django is by wiring up URLs to functions [0]. This is pretty similar to setting up a vector table for interrupt handlers. Is that a framework? What makes Django a framework and vector tables not a framework?

I'm not trying to be pedantic here, I just really couldn't tell you the difference, and as a result, I'm not sure the distinction is useful. It sounds more like a post-hoc rationalization of why you like or don't like something.

[0]: https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/4.1/intro/tutorial01/#writ...

> The C standard library is exactly that though, a framework for writing UNIX command line tools :)

It doesn't fit the term as used in the article at all, though, in that it doesn't dictate the overall program's flow of control.

The overall program flow in this case is:

   shell => CRT => main(argc, argv) => exit code => shell

(to me, the CRT and C standard lib are not strictly separate, although that's debatable of course)

Except none of these steps are dictated by the C standard library (some may be dictated by some libc's)

EDIT: To expand on this: You can call the code from stuff other than a shell; I'm assuming you mean "C runtime" by CRT, and some libc's may have issues without them, though usually only access to argc/argv and atexit(), and you can certainly write C without linking with the initialisation code; and while you'll of course usually enter via main() you don't have to. You decide the control flow.

CRT also does stuff like floating point emulation, loading dynamic libraries on demand instead of at load time (e.g on AIX and Windows), handling threads post C11, or runtime checks in hardened code.

The point is all of that is optional. You can - and I have - written C to be executed on bare hardware with no initialisation code, and depending on your choice of libc you can still use it (though some functionality may not be available).

At which point it is no longer C, rather a programing language that vaguely resembles ISO C.

Of course it is still C. You've just opted not to use some of the functionality.

Nothing stops you from e.g. providing your own startup code which then calls the appropriate initialisation code either.

The point being that there's no enforced inversion of control in the sense used by the article, and so calling it a framework in the sense described by the article is meaningless.

Even if we postulated the inversion of control was there, the fact you can replace all parts of it still means it does not fit the article definition.

Not from the point of view of ISO C and the expected semantics of the abstract C machine.

If you were to write a program that relies on those aspects of the abstract C machine and don't provide those aspects, then you might have an argument, in that in that case the observable behaviour would be different, but if you choose not to make use of that functionality, its presence is entirely irrelevant.

This is also massively shifting goal posts. You first wrote "At which point it is no longer C". By your argument here, e.g. the Linux kernel is not written predominantly in C. But nobody uses the term that way. If you were to speak specifically about ISO C, maybe, but the person I replied to initially did not limit it to ISO C.

As such this is also entirely irrelevant to the original argument.

Everyone knows Linux is actually written in GCC C, and Google has burned lots of dollars making it work with clang, if it was proper C, that wouldn't never been an issue.

And yet almost everyone would still agree that "GCC C" is also C, so this is entirely irrelevant to what was being discussed.

Yeah, that is why plenty people then show up on Stack Overflow with questions that prove how much they know C, versus "whatever my compiler did when I tried it out".

And this has even less to do with what was being discussed.

What was being discussed was that C without the CRT is a dialect of ISO C.

The kernel loads your program, and schedules its execution. This is basically the same as using an async framework and sending the entry point to your application.

If you're willing to extend a little, there are also signal handlers, or setting up callbacks in pthreads.

Again this isn't to be reductive, but to say this is a super common method of encapsulating irrelevant stuff. It doesn't seem to be a significant differentiation between "I'm a library" and "I'm a framework".