[salmo]

Sorry, I don't disagree at all and the message passing was a little tongue in cheek. I was in CS in the 90s, when the dream of a message passing microkernel utopia was so hot.

I don't see a way around this complaint other than starting from scratch. If you "fixed" C, you'd have to rebuild all those things underneath you. And the reason we do FFI is to not reinvent some chunk of code.

I think you fundamentally run into issues with ABI compatibility regardless of language. You get a step better if you could derive the ABI from the code, but there's always interop issues cross-language. I don't think you can avoid wandering into having to implement the isms of the provider's language.

So much baggage just comes from strings. Then you have higher level constructs like making threading/concurrency, memory management, etc. jive. That's even an issue at the API level. I use a ton of libraries that just wrap a C library with a language-idiomatic interface.