The statement that every language needs a runtime is false. Many early computers and many current small embedded processors have hardware instruction decoders and let programs compiled to binary machine code write directly to the IO registers, no run time of any sort needed after the program is loaded (unless you want to consider, for instance, the microcode in an MC68000, or the RTL for an FPGA RISC soft processor to be a runtime).

The statement that every language needs a runtime is false. Many early computers and many current small embedded processors have hardware instruction decoders and let programs compiled to binary machine code write directly to the IO registers, no run time of any sort needed after the program is loaded (unless you want to consider, for instance, the microcode in an MC68000, or the RTL for an FPGA RISC soft processor to be a runtime).

The problem is this kind of code is highly non-portable.

The statement that every language needs a runtime is false. Many early computers and many current small embedded processors have hardware instruction decoders and let programs compiled to binary machine code write directly to the IO registers, no run time of any sort needed after the program is loaded (unless you want to consider, for instance, the RTL for an FPGA soft processor to be a runtime).

The statement that every language needs a runtime is false. Many early computers and many current small embedded processors have hardware instruction decoders and let programs compiled to binary machine code write directly to the IO registers, no run time of any sort needed after the program is loaded (unless you want to consider, for instance, the microcode in an MC68000, or the RTL for an FPGA RISC soft processor to be a runtime).