> so they're distributed in source or intermediate form, not as fixed-ABI-shared-libraries.

I agree. These languages all have the benefit of what an ABI provides due to their nature. Go and Rust are outliers because they don't send out intermediate versions.

My point was more that the effect of being able to hot-patch applications on a system is what makes an ABI desirable, not that an ABI is necessary for that. For a language like rust, it's pretty necessary. Though it would be interesting if you could send out an intermediate compiled form of rust and do a JIT on that. WASM is pretty close to doing that, but rust doesn't support dynamic linking of modules (AFAIK).

> Even C++ has wrinkles.

Yeah, I somewhat hesitate to say C/C++ as being ABI stable as it's really just C and C++ uses that. Once you use any C++ features you quickly get into realms where things are ill defined. You end up needing gross things like COM in order to properly use C++ shared libs.