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codeflotoday at 8:59 AM2 repliesview on HN

Thousands of words that boil down to "intmax_t isn't ABI-stable". Who knew? (Everybody.)


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aw1621107today at 9:16 AM

I think that's somewhat overly reductive. A significant portion (maybe 1/3-1/2?) of the article is devoted to describing mechanisms by which an ABI could be evolved, including a new (?) mechanism implemented in the author's Clang fork and submitted to the C committee ([0] in the blog post, currently on revision 8 [1]). Sure, it isn't a perfect solution, but as the author says:

> at least we’ll finally have the chance to have that discussion [about breaking ABI] with our communities, rather than just being outright denied the opportunity before Day 0.

[0]: https://www.open-std.org/jtc1/sc22/wg14/www/docs/n2901.htm

[1]: https://www.open-std.org/jtc1/sc22/wg14/www/docs/n3913.htm

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pjmlptoday at 9:52 AM

Not really, because many don't even know there isn't such thing as C ABI, rather the OS ABI, when the OS happens to be written in C.

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