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There is no C demon. The OS ABI is (de facto — please spare the de jure nitpickery) a bunch of symbols you can call and a calling convention for them. You cal

There is no C demon. The OS ABI is (de facto — please spare the de jure nitpickery) a bunch of symbols you can call and a calling convention for them. You call into that ABI. What language is used to implement the other side of that ABI is irrelevant. The fact that this ABI is called "libc" doesn't really mean a whole lot. Neither is the fact that the same library contains a whole bunch of functions primarily useful to programs written in C.

10000truths 3y ago
Libc isn't just an ABI, it's a library - one that relies on an opinionated runtime. That's the demon, it's incidental complexity that has been ossified by past design decisions. There is no fundamental reason that interacting with an OS has to require anything more than the minimum necessary to transfer data to/from the kernel (e.g. supervisor trap instruction).