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Memory of being at 3Com, prior to 1991, and talking to a bunch of engineers about machine portability and the lack thereof. I said, "You probably could define a
by AlbertCory 4y ago
Memory of being at 3Com, prior to 1991, and talking to a bunch of engineers about machine portability and the lack thereof. I said, "You probably could define a subset of C such that really portable code could be written."
One said, dismissively, "Yeah. Dream on."
Not a real bright guy, as it turned out.
1991: joined Oracle, where they already had a whole style book listing things you could and couldn't do in C, including naming conventions so that your names would port to every one of the 90+ platforms they supported. (spoiler: it was 6-character names, later expanded to 8.)
- ncmncm 4y agoThe tyranny of linkers. Nobody wanted to write a new linker for whatever machine they targeted. Finally, GNU made a portable linker and saved the world. It might have been the first to support 32-character symbols, just about enough to link C++ programs without misery.
- AlbertCory 4y agoThere were platform groups who adapted the C code to each platform, which would include using the correct linker. But if you had code that broke the coding conventions, they could send it back.