[snip]

So what I ended up doing was to port a tiny subset of 2.11BSD libc to
Linux, including its types. I copied the ctime.c module and prefixed
everything with "cross_" so there was "cross_time_t" and so forth, and
"#include <time.h>" became "#include <cross/time.h>", in turn this
depends on "#include <cross/sys/types.h>" and so on. That way, the
original logic worked unchanged.

I decided to also redo the cross compilation tools (as, cc, ld, nm,
ranlib and so on) using the same approach, since it was conceptually
elegant. This involved making e.g. "cross_off_t" and "struct
cross_exec" available by "#include <cross/a.out.h>", and obviously the
scheme extends to whatever libc functions we want to use. In
particular we use floating point, and I plan to make a "cross_atof()"
for the C compiler's PDP-11-formatted floating-point constant
handling, etc. (This side of things, like the cross tools, was
working, but was not terribly elegant before).

So then I got to thinking, actually this is an incredibly powerful
approach. [snip]