[yxhuvud]

But you have to know that as well for C - there are for example several Linux system calls you really should not call manually because that would fuck up the internal state in LibC. Yes, the runtime is really small, comparatively speaking, but it is still a runtime.

[woodruffw]

Which system calls are you thinking of? The only ones that I can think of would be brk(2) and sbrk(2), but any recent libc should be resilient to calls to those.

That being said, I'll grant that the distinction between "tiny runtime" and "no runtime" isn't useful and that C can be said to have a runtime insofar as most systems provide a `crt0` or equivalent.