
Portability of C Programs and the Unix System (1978) - beefhash
https://www.bell-labs.com/usr/dmr/www/portpap.html
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bediger4000
"The source-language representation of most of the code involved is identical
in all environments."

Sometime between 1978 and about 1997, people figured out how to tie C code
strictly to a single architecture. About '97, I sat next to some people doing
a big C and I think X11 system on HP-UX. By 2000, they were trying to port it
to something else, Sun Solaris, probably. They couldn't do it. They never got
this system to run on something other than HP-UX.

The arc of portability is long, but bends toward "not" I think. It's basically
unheard of for people to write about the portability of anything these days,
C, C++, whatever. There's Windows, and there's Linux, both 64-bit, little-
endian, with a stack that grows down from high addresses, and a heap that
grows up. Both have the same sort of ideas about system calls, as near as I
can tell. Portability is dead.

