I think we should agree that `intmax_t` was a mistake and not focus on it so much in articles like this. It's enough that the C ABI is so hard to pin down, and that C headers are hard to parse.

What we really need to interop w/ C but w/o C is a C compiler based tool that outputs DWARF or DWARF-like debug output that actually lays out everything -- type sizes and layouts down to the individual bits that bitfields map to, enum values, constant-like macros, etc. Function-like macros you'll never really be able to use from other languages, so, oh well. Such debug metadata would have to be encoded in a stable/committed encoding, expressed in a stable schema.

With that sort of debug info a language like Rust could take care of all C interop natively w/o C, especially if those debug files were included with the OS so that Rust wouldn't need to invoke the tool that generates them. Though, obviously some `-D...` C compiler/pre-processor arguments can radically change the contents of the parsed headers, so some rationalization would be needed to cut down the number of "ABIs" to a manageable set (like GNU, BSD, POSIX).

That sounds like C2FFI: https://github.com/rpav/c2ffi

The only language ecosystem where I've seen it used is Common Lisp, in the CL-Autowrap library (https://github.com/rpav/cl-autowrap).

But C2FFI emits plain JSON, so I don't see any reason why you couldn't build e.g. a Python auto-binding library on top of it. It depends on LLVM to generate the spec file, but end users don't need to have that.