Post #3213161

2023-11-03 18:34 UTC

@thephd@pony.social "your computer is not a PDP-11" - Hm, has anyone made a Mastadon client for the PDP-11 yet? Then they can yell at their VT100 when you make a comment like this. Not only is pure conformant ISO C insufficient for kernel or embedded development. How many non-trivial C applications or libraries at all are actually portable to all conformant implementations? (No OS specific calls, doesn't assume 8 bit bytes, works with 16-bit ints...) You see enough trouble with endianness and alignment.

Replies (3)

@pthariensflame@social.treehouse.systems 2023-11-03 18:37

@ids1024@fosstodon.org @thephd@pony.social I think the requirement for “nontrivial” makes this answer immediately “none”, for one simple reason: minimum implementation limits. A nontrivial C program, even if otherwise strictly spec-compliant, is definitely going to blow past limits on function name length and source code size and number of variables in a file and so on.

Open ##3213162
@jonoabroad@mastodon.nz 2023-11-03 18:38

@ids1024@fosstodon.org @thephd@pony.social I love that the comment exists and the heckle is this. You are both wonderful, thank you.

Open ##3213163
@KevinMarks@xoxo.zone 2023-11-03 18:54

@ids1024@fosstodon.org @thephd@pony.social I'm getting flashbacks to all the Endian.h stuff we had in QuickTime to deal with all the different processor architectures we compiled to. Which is pretty much how Apple can swap CPU options to this day.

Open ##3213164