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Comment by masklinn | Hacker News Reader

> You could also describe it as doing the sane thing (avoiding hardcoding against the libc ABI through FFI)

No, you could not.

On pretty much every system but linux the libc (or equivalent) is the officially supported API to the kernel. Bypassing it is not supported and thus definitionally can not be sane, that's like declaring that doing the sane thing is avoiding hardcoding against the front door and entering your home through the roof instead. The front door is what you're supposed to use, do hardcode against it. Same with libc.

And Go has been going "ouch" then putting its fingers straight back in the socket from the start, as it keeps trying to work around libcs on all the platform where it is not supported.

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It's not about hardcoding, it's about the fact that libc isn't even an ABI, really. It's a C source API, which compiles down to a secret ABI that you can't know (you just have to expand all the macros and see what you get). That's sort of OK if every compiled program in the world is written in C, but as soon as you want to start writing in another language it kind of falls apart.

On linux the stable API and ABI that you are supposed to use is also just libc. But due to various reasons people think that the libc ABI is less stable than how stable it really is.

Edit: NT with its split OS API dll and separate libc is its own can of worms. You can have multiple instances of libc in the same address space, which among other things implies that you cannot safely malloc() in one module and free() in another, and don't even think about passing FILE* around.

Linux doesn’t have an official libc. Raw syscalls are its only official API.

My point is that libc as the only system API is not a sane choice, and appeals to tradition don't make it less insane.

> My point is that libc as the only system API is not a sane choice

That might be your new point after having yeeted the goalposts out, but it's definitely not your original statement.

> and appeals to tradition don't make it less insane.

This is not an appeal to tradition, it's how things work. If the authors and maintainers of the system tell you something is the supported API, wilfully bypassing that supported API is not "the sane thing", especially when you complain that your bypass blows your face off down the line, then you're an asshole too.

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