4 ms·
>, but a lower level API that wouldn't require a runtime yet still was superior to C's feels like a massive win for the industry that's just waiting to happen.
by jasode 9y ago
>, but a lower level API that wouldn't require a runtime yet still was superior to C's feels like a massive win for the industry that's just waiting to happen.
A lower-level binary API was tried before in the 1990s by various players. Microsoft's effort was COM/COM+ to unify programming languages across binary boundaries.[1] Another initiative was CORBA.[2]
Those technologies are still alive in various legacy forms but they haven't taken over the landscape like the proponents thought they would. (Although the whole MS .NET ecosystem introduced in 2002 is arguably a continuation of COM+ by a different name.)
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Component_Object_Model https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Component_Object_Model
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_Object_Request_Broker_Architecture https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_Object_Request_Broker_A...
- adrianratnapala 9y agoI see what you mean that COM and Corba tried to unify programming across language boundaries. But they were not a low-level ABI type thing. They explicitly pushed a particular idea of what objects are and what they are for. In any case, judged by the standard of becoming a universal ABI, they were also designed to "fail" in the sense that MS wasn't going too sit around and standardise it across operating systems, while the CORBA was a (feeble) response from the Unix world that no one expected would take off on Windows.