A thousand times this. I understand the frustration of principled PL authors trying to bootstrap an ecosystem for programs compiled from their language to run

A thousand times this. I understand the frustration of principled PL authors trying to bootstrap an ecosystem for programs compiled from their language to run on. It can be frustrating having to interact with foreign memory that you don't control and specifications that intentionally leave much to be desired by allowing the hardware platform to decide the memory layout... But if you didn't have these things it would be a lot harder to get even a basic system going. It would be nice if there were _one_ standard way to encode an sized integer to rule them all... but we don't live in that ideal world. Pick an arbitrary, common layout, and stick with that. Your language might not let users target some micro-controller that runs on a toothbrush but you probably don't need to anyway.