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by pjmlp 1892 days ago
So easy that to actually make C portable, UNIX had to be made into a C standard library via POSIX, otherwise portable C code is basically just logic and data structures.
1 comments

Sure, but the flipside of that is that UNIX itself is fairly easy to port to a new CPU, due to being mostly written in C.

So port your compiler, figure out a syscall interface on your CPU, patch it into unix/libc and compile them, and.. it's not like that's a small amount of work but it's way easier than bootstrapping any other environment from scratch on a new architecture.

There's surely some amount of historical accident here as well, but no other language/OS combo ran on like 12 different architectures in the 80s.

Because no other timesharing OS was available in free beer source code for others to port it, it had nothing to do with C.