Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by dboon 30 days ago
I have no philosophical complaints with supporting odd architectures in general. I agree that most obscure targets are probably not that much code, since the library is factored with this in mind (e.g. basic WASM support took an afternoon).

It's stated as a non-goal simply because it's not the most valuable thing I can do with my time. My fundamental stance is that writing new Windows or Linux or macOS or WASM programs in C is a good idea, and those are the programs that I write, so that's where my focus is. But if someone would like to come along and write the ~30 syscalls needed to port the library to a new platform, or even register any interest in such, I'd be happy to look into it at that point.

1 comments

That's fine. Just don't call it "ultra portable" while treating it as a non-goal.
He's already hit the hard targets. I think ultra portable is an accurate description. Portable means able to be ported, not "has been ported".
Like. He's done the first 90%, leaving only the other 90%. And I mean that a little as a joke but also very sincerely. The supported platforms are a decent starting point, but mainstream OSs on little-endian 64-bit processors doesn't strike me as "the hard targets". NetBSD ( https://wiki.netbsd.org/ports/ ) is ultra portable. This is just portable.
I'm seeing that people have a big issue with the language, but "ultra" doesn't even necessarily mean "total"
Ultra might be a step below total, but the 3 most common OSs on the 2 most common ISAs is ... several steps below ultra.