Yes. If you disabled unions and pointer casts, basically no C code would compile.

It’s similar to any tech buzzword. Take “agile” for example. Agile was successfully sold as being a great idea without really being well-defined. Suddenly anyone selling a development methodology had a strong incentive to pitch it as being the real way to do agile development.

In the 90s and 2000s every 10x california tech guru agreed that OO was the future, but apparently none of them actually liked smalltalk. Instead, every new language with a hint of dynamic dispatch suddenly claimed to represent the truest virtues of OO.

There are also people who argue that smalltalk is not true OO. They say that by Alan Kay’s own definition the most OO language is Erlang.

I think it’s most useful to learn about that history, instead of worrying about people’s post-hoc academic definitions.

Also somewhere in the middle:

“There’s been no report of this for a while so we’re marking it resolved.”

The real question is how we got any portable solution to this problem in the first place.

To me problems are fundamentally economic and political, not technical. For example, the unique circumstances that led to a portable web standard involved multiple major interventions against Microsoft by antitrust regulators (in 2001, 2006, 2009, 2013, etc). The other tech giants were happy to go along with this as a way to break microsoft’s monopoly. Very soon after, Google and Apple put the walls straight back up with mobile apps.

If you go back before HTML, OS research was progressing swiftly towards portable, high-level networked GUI technology via stuff like smalltalk. Unfortunately all of the money was mysteriously pulled from those research groups after Apple and Microsoft stole all the smalltalk research and turned it into a crude walled garden of GUI apps, then started printing money faster than the US Mint.

Whenever you see progress towards portable solutions, such as Xamarin and open source C#, React Native, or even Flutter, it is usually being funded by a company that lost a platform war and is now scrambling to build some awkward metaplatform on top of everyone else’s stuff. It never really works.

One exception is webassembly, which was basically forced into existence against everyone’s will by some ingenious troublemakers at Mozilla. That’s a whole other story though!