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by jcranmer 2674 days ago
Honestly, I wish a few different major languages would get together and start developing system ABIs that move beyond C as the interchange language.
1 comments
wilsonthewhale 2674 days ago
But what would you put in such an ABI beyond what's in the C ABI? Beyond basic data types, struct defintions, and function definitions, languages begin to wildly diverge almost immediately.
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jcranmer 2674 days ago
Multiple return values. Ownership annotations. SIMD type support. String charset information.

More challenging would be to include stuff like allocation management (how to free a pointer when it's done), GC integration, function boxing, iterator/generator support. Vtables and cross-language inheritance is interesting but difficult.

One point of clarity: this would be an FFI ABI, not necessarily expecting that most datatypes would be laid out according to the ABI.

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ChrisSD 2674 days ago
> Vtables and cross-language inheritance is interesting but difficult.

Windows' COM "solved" that problem. For example see C++/WinRT[0] for a modern C++ interface to COM. Or the C# .NET equivalents.

[0] https://github.com/Microsoft/cppwinrt

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int_19h 2674 days ago
Take a look at this.

https://github.com/Microsoft/xlang

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