Re: OT: Language War (Re: "C" Manual)

[Ben Collins <bcollins@debian.org>]

On Mon, Dec 31, 2001 at 03:46:38PM -0800, Eric G. Miller wrote:
> 
> Well, I dare you to remove 'ld' or 'libc.so' and see how many programs
> run ;-)  I think it's fair to characterize required language libraries
> as part of the "run time" system.  Whether or not a program is statically
> compiled is unimportant, as the language library still performs actions
> at runtime that "your" program depends on, and which "your" program
> could not function without.  Among those things, might be checking
> array accesses and raising exceptions for range errors...

I assume you mean ld.so.

The fact is that the C library is not needed in order to use C (else
libc.so would require itself in a neverending loop). You can easily
write C programs that use nothing from libc.so/libc.a. You can't write
java, perl and python that don't need their runtime.

The Linux kernel is an excellent example of a C program that is
self-contained.

Think of libraries as conveniences, not requirements.

I would also point out that java, python, php and perl runtime are
written in _C_. It's easy to characterize an interpreted language by
noting that it's runtime executable is written in a language other than
itself.

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