linux-kernel - Re: Metalanguage for the Linux UAPI

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Message-ID: <425880dd-e694-4428-999e-a787a666de5f@zytor.com>
Date: Thu, 15 May 2025 14:42:01 -0700
From: "H. Peter Anvin" <hpa@...or.com>
To: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@...ux-foundation.org>
Cc: Arnd Bergmann <arnd@...db.de>, LKML <linux-kernel@...r.kernel.org>,
        libc-alpha@...rceware.org, linux-arch@...r.kernel.org
Subject: Re: Metalanguage for the Linux UAPI

On 5/15/25 14:20, Linus Torvalds wrote:
> 
> If you _really_ want to do a Metalanguage for these things, and want
> to support lots of different namespace issues, several different
> languages etc, I have a very practical suggestion: make that
> metalanguage have a very strict and traditional syntax. Make it look
> like C with the C pre-processor.
> 
> There are lots of libraries and tools to parse C, and turn it into
> other forms. Making up a new language when we already *have* a good
> language is all kinds of silly. Just use the language it already is
> in, and take advantage of the fact that there's lots of infrastructure
> for that language.
> 

Yes, and I looked at using sparse for this purpose. It is not a bad
choice all things considered, but there is definitely metadata that we
simply don't provide.

Building it on top of sparse might still very well be The Right Thing.

It doesn't just affect libc, either; it also affects tools like strace,
sanitizer, and so on. The situation with ioctls is by far the worst.

	-hpa