1. Applications

1.1 Portable assembler

Unlike Ada, C is not an inherently portable language. However, thirty years' experience of porting Unix and/or all its utilities (a few million lines of code) to a few hundred different types of computers or operating systems has enabled us to develop a pragmatically portable subset of C.

This subset, which corresponds to the "portable assembler" side, is used to write applications or libraries designed to run on numerous machines. Examples in this category include GNU utilities, the X Window system, database access libraries, the Apache HTTP server and more. This subset can also be used as a compiler target, translating a very high-level language into a simpler one: C. The existence of C compilers for virtually any existing machine means...