You can commit a lot of sins with ABIs if you throw the academic books into the fire. For example, on my side I'm developing tooling that allows one to delink

You can commit a lot of sins with ABIs if you throw the academic books into the fire. For example, on my side I'm developing tooling that allows one to delink programs back into object files. This allows me to commit a whole bunch of heresy according to CS101, such as making a native port of a Linux program to Windows without having access to its source code or taking binary code from a PlayStation game and stuffing it into a Linux MIPS program. When you're doing that kind of dark magic, it's one of those "know the rules so well you can break them" situation. Instead of following the theory that tells you what you should do, you follow the real-life world that constrains what you can do.