[dmcdm]

>Unless your code is compiled, deployed to a rocket, and fired off the Earth never to return, the question of “what is my platform?” is meaningless in the context of writing good C.

While I feel the tone of your comparison was intended to be a bit hyberbolic, the reality is a bulk of modern C development occurs in a context similar to the one you describe. Further the thought, utterly foreign to the vast majority of software developers, that the physical machine may not be some utterly abstract and constantly mutating target which there is no hope of understanding is, imo, one of the great dying arts of software engineering - a death perpetuated by the same sort of folks who think CS education should be carried on in Java.

I contend that, these days, most C is written to target a particular compiler, physical machine, and/or device.

[erik_seaberg]

There is vastly more old C code than new, and it didn't target the x64 or ARM architectures it's running on now. Where it wasn't portable, that was a defect that had to be fixed.

My first job was a 4GL targeting customers running DOS on the 80286, complete with runtime linking. 100% of that work has been abandoned due to incompatibility. It contributed nothing to the profession beyond what I personally learned.

[scarface74]

There is a Mac program BBEdit that was first written to target 68K 32 bit Macs, then PPC 32 bit Macs, then 32 bit x86 Macs and then 64 bit Macs. Probably within the next 3 years it will target ARM Macs.

The author said he never did a full scale rewrite. He slowly migrated code from one platform to the next.

Today, Apple’s code runs on both ARM and x86 and with Marzipan, as will developers code. True most will be in Objective C, but some low level code is still in C.