On one hand, from an idealistic point of view, I agree, and am a very, very big believer of having actual, carefully designed ABIs for kernel (and inter-process

On one hand, from an idealistic point of view, I agree, and am a very, very big believer of having actual, carefully designed ABIs for kernel (and inter-process) communications. On the other hand, the structures required to do syscalls via libc/kernel32 are generally simple enough that it's not a huge deal, and the difference between doing a raw syscall and doing a function call is unlikely to actually matter. Fun fact/pet peeve: on android, if you want to communicate with most services, you need to go through Binder. While the low-level Binder ABI is stable, the services written on top of it aren't, and often change in backwards-incompatible ways. This includes core services like SurfaceFlinger (necessary to draw on the screen). This means that it's generally impossible to create purely native software on android - you always have to call into Java to talk to those services.