A lot of programming decisions were made to save a byte here and there. It's easy to point at them today and say they're "bad", but at the time they were the absolutely correct thing to do. It's hard to imagine now but not saving that byte could mean your program wouldn't fit into RAM. Try telling your management in the 1960s that your program won't load because it's "properly coded" and see how far you get.
What we've failed to do is ever revisit those decisions and change them where we've identified problems. Yes, you can probably compile (with warnings) files from UNIX v7, but we pay for that compatibility. But there's no question designing, building and maintaining a libc alternative is a colossal undertaking and not likely to happen on a whim. So here we are.
What we've failed to do is ever revisit those decisions and change them where we've identified problems. Yes, you can probably compile (with warnings) files from UNIX v7, but we pay for that compatibility. But there's no question designing, building and maintaining a libc alternative is a colossal undertaking and not likely to happen on a whim. So here we are.