Darren New <dne### [at] sanrrcom> wrote:
> Isn't that more a C++ thing than a x86 ABI thing? Is it the calling
> conventions to the OS, the stack frame format, or the C++ name mangling and
> structure layout that changed?

Don't know details - I'm just quoting. But it's a GNU thing in any case, and
although "GNU's Not Unix", GNU's Linux. (Well, that's not perfectly true, but
anyway...)

> > It was only the success of "IBM
> > compatible (!) PCs" that started the whole binary compatibility thing anyway.
>
> Nah. CP/M before that, and lots of mainframe stuff before that, SPARC
> stations too, etc.  People have wanted binary compatibility since core
> memory days.

I don't know about SPARC, but successors of CP/M threw binary compatibility
overboard (had to, because they switched from 8080 to something else). MS-DOS
for instance, which in its very core was "heavily inspired" by CP/M, and
included some data structures just for the sake of compatibility with it.

And if I remember correctly, there were even things like CP/M for 68k systems,
which is definitely bye-bye to binary compatibility.


Sure, people have *wanted* binary compatibility since core memory days, but
since when did people get *used* to it?

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