alt Hacker News> Linux has a stable system call ABI
This is a noble but practically worthless ideal. Hardly anything is written against the kernel ABI except glibc itself. End-user application developers don't write against the kernel interface. Platform library and application developers like KDE and GNOME don't really write against the kernel interface either. Nowadays even driver developers don't entirely write against the kernel interface, instead also linking in glibc and lib{std}c++ for things like shader compilers (which is nowadays usually just a fork of Clang). Like it or not, glibc is the singular entry point for desktop Linux, which is the point of essentially every comment under this post.
That 'desktop Linux ≡ glibc' is something that I daresay the kernel developers also have to take responsibility for, rather than shrugging their shoulders and pawning it off to GNU. Linux's unstable user-mode is the entire reason for Docker's existence. It is bodge upon bodge and has led to much gnashing of teeth. The GNU/Linux community (I don't care for Stallman's meme rant here) have to grow a backbone and understand that an OS is much more than just a kernel, it is a platform, and currently the Linux platform is a disparate set of communities with highly divergent goals.
That's why I've always said the best Linux is Android, because Android is a platform.
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It's more than a little funny that you disparage syscalls being Linux's stable interface, and then immediately praise Android, which only works because glibc isn't uniquely privileged the way you seem to want.
Also, I daily drive Alpine Linux (using musl) and I'm quite happy to assure you that glibc really is only one option, not at all mandatory for desktop Linux.
> Hardly anything is written against the kernel ABI except glibc itself.
I'm working hard to change that.
Here's an entire lisp interpreter written in freestanding C using nothing but Linux system calls:
https://github.com/lone-lang/lone
It has a system-call primitive too, which means it can do anything.
Here's a TCP echo server written in lone lisp:
https://github.com/lone-lang/lone/blob/master/examples/tcp-e...
It works, and you don't need libc.
> Like it or not, glibc is the singular entry point for desktop Linux
Well I don't like it, and I've made it my mission to fix it.
Maybe lisp isn't the answer, Rust is. I've revived my liblinux crate too.
https://github.com/matheusmoreira/liblinux
I'm going to add system calls to this thing every day until I have every single one. Then I'll use them to make all of my applications.
Already have my first project planned: a custom Rust network stack for my QEMU virtual machines so I can firewall them off in userspace without root access.
> the Linux platform
The linux platform is these system calls. Everything else is userspace. This is exactly what makes it special.
https://www.matheusmoreira.com/articles/linux-system-calls