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Yes, but if 30 years ago ARM had an ISO standard they could point to, that would have probably helped with government adoption?

(It's still a trade-off, because standards also cost community time and effort.)





Relatedly, 30 years ago someone attempted to turn the Windows 3.1 API into an ISO standard:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Application_Programming_Interf...

It didn't become one, but it did become standardised as ECMA-234:

https://ecma-international.org/publications-and-standards/st...


Well, Wine shows that Win32 is the only stable ABI, even on Linux.

>On May 5, 1993, Sun Microsystems announced Windows Application Binary Interface (WABI), a product to run Windows software on Unix, and the Public Windows Interface (PWI) initiative, an effort to standardize a subset of the popular 16-bit Windows APIs.

>In February 1994, the PWI Specification Committee sent a draft specification to X/Open—who rejected it in March, after being threatened by Microsoft's assertion of intellectual property rights (IPR) over the Windows APIs

Looks like that's what it was.




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