[LLVMdev] LLVMdev Digest, Vol 75, Issue 36

[John McCall]

On Sep 17, 2010, at 8:01 PM, Peter Lawrence wrote:
> hmmm, that reply seems to miss the point, C is an "ok" language for  
> writing OSs in, but a terrible language to write compilers in,

As I understand it, there are two goals of the C API, neither of which is
allow people to write compilers specifically in C.  The first is to provide
a stable, forward-binary-compatible API, which might as well be written
in C since it shouldn't encode any structure layout at all;  the guarantee of
eternal support is why we don't add new features to this API lightly.
The second is to support bindings to other languages, which are far
more likely to have a FFI to C than they are to C++.

John.