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That's a misleading comment, and I can't find a valid point in there. You can run C on a different platform than UNIX, or "run it on bare metal", just as well.

That's a misleading comment, and I can't find a valid point in there. You can run C on a different platform than UNIX, or "run it on bare metal", just as well. If you write C, you make reasonable abstractions, to achieve some amount of OS independency, just as well. And typical usage of "rich language runtimes" is on one of the mainstream OSes, just as well. You even often have some OS specific code in there, because the OS is not entirely interchangeable. So, the OS does not lose more of its meaning if you move to rich language runtime environments. Those language environments are mostly about garbage collection. Most other things that make the OS "lose its meaning" are just libraries (that you can write in any language).

pjmlp 7y ago
Those language runtimes exist since the 60's, 10 years before C created the urban myth of being the first systems language, and many of them did not have anything to do with garbage collection. Developing on Windows, and deploying across several UNIX flavours, mainframes and embedded targets has been pretty much OS independent for me during the last two decades, regardless how much OS specific code those runtime libraries might have inside of them. Even if the CI/CD pipeline had to do OS specific builds.
- jstimpfle 7y ago
  > Those language runtimes exist since the 60's, 10 years before C created the urban myth of being the first systems language I don't know what's your point here, or why you keep repeating this on HN hundreds of times. I didn't ever hear anyone claiming it was the "first systems language". Nor do I care. (We all want a better language. I haven't tried many, but any other systems language I've seen I've found awkward, starting with Pascal with its mess of 1-based vs 0-based indexing, case insensitivity, weird mix of ref-counted / manually managed, weird syntax choices, mess of basic string types, requirement to create tons of typealiases... going to older languages that have upper-case only identifiers, for example). As to rest - it's just a matter of libraries. Not runtimes. EDIT: it seems some definitions of runtime include standard libraries. So, whatever.

pjmlp 7y ago

Those language runtimes exist since the 60's, 10 years before C created the urban myth of being the first systems language, and many of them did not have anything to do with garbage collection. Developing on Windows, and deploying across several UNIX flavours, mainframes and embedded targets has been pretty much OS independent for me during the last two decades, regardless how much OS specific code those runtime libraries might have inside of them. Even if the CI/CD pipeline had to do OS specific builds.

jstimpfle 7y ago
> Those language runtimes exist since the 60's, 10 years before C created the urban myth of being the first systems language I don't know what's your point here, or why you keep repeating this on HN hundreds of times. I didn't ever hear anyone claiming it was the "first systems language". Nor do I care. (We all want a better language. I haven't tried many, but any other systems language I've seen I've found awkward, starting with Pascal with its mess of 1-based vs 0-based indexing, case insensitivity, weird mix of ref-counted / manually managed, weird syntax choices, mess of basic string types, requirement to create tons of typealiases... going to older languages that have upper-case only identifiers, for example). As to rest - it's just a matter of libraries. Not runtimes. EDIT: it seems some definitions of runtime include standard libraries. So, whatever.