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> Apple (who broke every Go binary a few years ago)

That's a really weird way to phrase it. Apple says that interface is unstable. Go uses it anyway. The unstable interface turns out to be unstable.

It wasn't Apple that broke Go binaries. It was Go.



Just because they don't maintain it stably doesn't mean they shouldn't do so.


Wishing Apple did something differently does not make it so. Either you accept the stable interface for what it is or you accept your binaries may break. And you've only yourself to "blame" in the latter case.


I don't have to blame anyone because I don't own any Apple products, what I'm getting at is that Apple's "Minimal Documentation, force through our blessed channels" way of going about things is kind of remarkable given that microsoft have been absolutely slammed for similar actions in the past.


BSDs traditionally don't have a stable syscall ABI.

Windows never had a stable syscall ABI either.

Almost only Linux does it... because the kernel and libc are maintained as separate projects in the Linux world.


FreeBSD does have a stable syscall ABI. But it's not _the_ stable ABI people should be using; the advertised stable ABI is the libc.


> Almost only Linux does it... because the kernel and libc are maintained as separate projects in the Linux world.

That's because Linux is just that: a kernel. And people are free to build their userspace on top of it.


I don't really do OS development so I was mostly using this as a microcosm of the wider practice.

Practically as long as it's trivially callable from C I'm not bothered.


Systemd should also be the libc provider.


There has to be a line draw somewhere to demarcate where the interface of a system is defined. Just as Linux does not attempt to ensure that using /dev/mem to manipulate kernel data structures works the same between versions, many operating systems don’t make promises about the syscall interface.


I must say I'm amused that my own personal opinion on software is this down worthy




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