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ABI == important; API == not so much...

ABI == important; API == not so much...

Posted Nov 30, 2010 23:21 UTC (Tue) by madscientist (subscriber, #16861)
In reply to: He meant GLibC function, not syscall... by khim
Parent article: The kernel and the C library as a single project

Yes, I agree... exactly why my comments were all discussing ABI backward-compatibility. Your example of the sched_setaffinity(2) call is, as you say, a great example of my point... ensuring that a backward-compatible ABI is available involves a lot of tricky footsie-playing with the linker etc.

API compatibility is a completely different animal: if you're going to use Linux-specific APIs then I suppose you just have to fix your code if they change in the future. If you don't want to do that, restrict yourself to POSIX and other standard APIs. I don't really worry about this, to be honest.


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