> The article is disingenuous. Alongside its oh-so-sassy table of file sizes for helloworld, it needs a table of runtimes for helloworld. Turning stdio into an API instead of preprocessor soup is going to blow that up, unless the guy means something very unusual by "API".
You seem to be deeply confused here. This is simply a proposal for persisting the AST for eg) stdio across compiler invocations instead of reparsing it on every textual substitution of a #include, and isolating source AST changes from erroneously corrupting header ASTs. It has no runtime implications because the outputs of the linking stage will be identical.
stdio's preprocessor soup is its API. You seem to be the one with an unusual and much narrower meaning of "API".
You seem to be deeply confused here. This is simply a proposal for persisting the AST for eg) stdio across compiler invocations instead of reparsing it on every textual substitution of a #include, and isolating source AST changes from erroneously corrupting header ASTs. It has no runtime implications because the outputs of the linking stage will be identical.
stdio's preprocessor soup is its API. You seem to be the one with an unusual and much narrower meaning of "API".