This means that any Rust ABI would have to cater for link-time specialization. I think this should be doable, but it would require a solution that's better than just to move the code generation into the linker. Instead, one would need to carefully consider the usage of the "shape" of all parameters of a function.
It should extend the C ABI with things like strings, arrays, objects with a way to destruct them, and provide some safety guarantees.
As an example, the windows world has COM, which is at the core pretty reasonable for its design constraints, even if gnarly sometimes.
CLR was going to be the COM Runtime+, and idea was reborn again as Windows team with their anti-.NET bias decided to redo Longhorn in C++, with WinRT.
"Turning to the past to power Windows’ future: An in-depth look at WinRT"
https://arstechnica.com/features/2012/10/windows-8-and-winrt...
It is also how Android IPC and Apple's XPC kind of get into the picture.
The elephant in the room is that FOSS OSes hardly embrace such solutions.
now to simply get everyone to stop what theyre doing so they can rewrite their c code into this new language, shouldnt be too hard i imagine
> As an example, the windows world has COM, which is at the core pretty reasonable for its design constraints, even if gnarly sometimes.
Yeah, and we had CORBA. Gnome was originally not a DE - the acronym stood for Gnu Network Object Model Environment or similar.
I programmed in CORBA in the 90s. Other than being slower than a snail on weed, I liked it just fine. Maybe it's time for a resurgence of something similar, but without requiring that calls work across networks.