On 23 June 2015 at 08:02, Matthew Fernandez
When we made the change, out rationale was that anyone using the syscall stubs would have libc available anyway. This certainly introduces a circular dependency, but it's not easy to remove without repeating parts of one library in the other or playing tricks with externs and weak symbols. In my experience, all of this is more fragile and less preferable than living with the circular dependency. However, my opinion may not be universally shared as we haven't had a discussion about this for some time.
There are many cases where you may want syscalls and not libc, for example several programming languages use direct bindings not bindings via libc (eg Go). I am interested in porting a different libc, and while the bits needed may well be ABI compatible it is hard to tell. So I would much rather the syscall stubs could be used standalone without a libc. Justin