alt Hacker NewsLinus ships a kernel –– where would his stable interface live if not the syscall ABI? The *BSD and macOS folks ship operating systems, where they have the option of defining their ABI at a higher level of abstraction.
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kaba0 • 11/08/2024
And for what it's worth, the reason Windows has such a high binary backwards compatibility that win 98 programs can easily run on win 11 or so is that they have this extra abstraction layer.
Linux could have made their own libc and mandated use of it. But they didn't. They chose a language agnostic binary interface that's documented at the instruction set level.
As a result of that brilliant design choice, every single language can make Linux system calls natively. It should be simple for JIT compilers to generate Linux system call code. No need to pull in some huge C library just for this. AOT compilers could have a linux_system_call builtin that just generates the required instructions. I actually posted this proposal to the GCC mailing list.