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> Please note this is intended for people who don't care about desktop GUIs, and just want stdio and sockets [...] Not to diminish the achievement at all, but

> Please note this is intended for people who don't care about desktop GUIs, and just want stdio and sockets [...] Not to diminish the achievement at all, but a significant limitation to be noted (and not a very surprising limitation). I also wonder about things like the sizeof(long). On 64-bit linux, this is 8, but on windows, it's 4. Well, "on windows"... maybe this throws all the APIs that make such assumptions, uh, out the window, (puts on sunglasses).

jart 6y ago
Author here. That's not an inherent limitation. See https://justine.lol/apelife/index.html https://justine.lol/apelife/index.html for an example of a GUI + TUI that's built using Cosmopolitan. The reason why I said what you quoted, is I'm simply trying to calibrate expectations. I don't view desktop GUIs as a productive area of focus, because there's such a lack of consensus surrounding the APIs that requires, and web browsers do a great job. As for sizeof(long) it's 64-bit with Cosmopolitan, which uses an LP64 data model. That hasn't impacted its ability to use the WIN32 API. See https://github.com/jart/cosmopolitan/tree/master/libc/nt https://github.com/jart/cosmopolitan/tree/master/libc/nt where WIN32 API functions are declared using uint32_t, int64_t, etc. It works great. I compile my Windows apps on Linux and it feels wonderful to not have to touch MSVC. Cosmopolitan even takes care of the chore of translating your UTF-8 strings into UTF-16 when polyfilling functions like open() which delegates to CreateFile() on Windows.
- smcameron 6y ago
  Thanks for the informative reply. > and web browsers do a great job. Suppose one had a native linux game that uses POSIX, OpenGL and SDL. Is there any hope?
  - gary_0 6y ago
    Having given the apelife source a glance, it seems quite possible to me; it already shows you how to create a window on Win32. And SDL2 has already been ported to Emscripten/WASM after all, and OpenGL is really no trouble, since it's usually accessed through a mostly platform-agnostic C API wrapper already (see for example, https://github.com/Dav1dde/glad https://github.com/Dav1dde/glad ). And maybe you could use MinGW to support POSIX on Win32...
  - mst 6y ago
    Now I want to see somebody better at C than me try smashing cosmopolitan and the C version of Dear Imgui together and see what happens.
- mhd 6y ago
  Regarding consensus desktop APIs, maybe it's time to re-invent/-introduce Win32s ;) (Although adding that to the library would add considerable bloat, and cross-platform runtime dynamic linking or a "dynamic polyfill" might be a bit beyond the scope of this) Or raw X11 protocol, of course (WSL made X11 servers on Win10 quite common, and . If that wouldn't be so horrible, it would be interesting how small one could get basic widgets starting from scratch.
  - Asooka 6y ago
    It should be possible to compile wxWidgets with Cosmopolitan, one variant per platform (win32, POSIX/X11, MacOS) and initialise the correct one at runtime depending on where you're launched, no?
  - mwcampbell 6y ago
    > it would be interesting how small one could get basic widgets starting from scratch. Please don't do this for any application with a wide audience. Small, simple widgets are missing many important things such as accessibility and internationalization.
    - mhd 6y ago
      Sure, as do most TUIs and a lot of web apps. I'm merely suggesting a hack that goes along with this hack, not the foundation technology for a mono-binary Office clone. Re-inventing the UI wheel seems somewhat common within the Go and Rust communities (as is re-inventing everything else), this would just have raw X11 protocol messages via socket as the foundation layer, not Vulkan/GL/SDL. And there just enough to be useful, e.g. text, input, buttons, canvas… For something more serious, I suggest re-inventing PostScript/NeWs as a service, of course.
      - mwcampbell 6y ago
        > I'm merely suggesting a hack that goes along with this hack, not the foundation technology for a mono-binary Office clone. Sure. I just worry that one person's clever hack will then become another person's indispensable tool, which they'll then impose on their colleagues, employees, or contractors, blocking a third person from doing their job. I know a blind person who temporarily lost his job because his employer's largest client required an application that didn't work with screen readers. So I just want to make sure developers are aware of accessibility, and in general, the risks of reinventing things that are necessarily complex.
- mwcampbell 6y ago
  > Cosmopolitan even takes care of the chore of translating your UTF-8 strings into UTF-16 when polyfilling functions like open() which delegates to CreateFile() on Windows. That shortcoming of the MSVC runtime has been the bane of multiple projects I've done on Windows. Even without the portable executable trick, Cosmo might be useful as an alternative Windows CRT that can be used with GCC or clang. (Edit: Except that ARM64 Windows is now a thing, whereas Cosmo seems to assume the continued hegemony of x86-64.)

jart 6y ago

Author here. That's not an inherent limitation. See https://justine.lol/apelife/index.html https://justine.lol/apelife/index.html for an example of a GUI + TUI that's built using Cosmopolitan. The reason why I said what you quoted, is I'm simply trying to calibrate expectations. I don't view desktop GUIs as a productive area of focus, because there's such a lack of consensus surrounding the APIs that requires, and web browsers do a great job. As for sizeof(long) it's 64-bit with Cosmopolitan, which uses an LP64 data model. That hasn't impacted its ability to use the WIN32 API. See https://github.com/jart/cosmopolitan/tree/master/libc/nt https://github.com/jart/cosmopolitan/tree/master/libc/nt where WIN32 API functions are declared using uint32_t, int64_t, etc. It works great. I compile my Windows apps on Linux and it feels wonderful to not have to touch MSVC. Cosmopolitan even takes care of the chore of translating your UTF-8 strings into UTF-16 when polyfilling functions like open() which delegates to CreateFile() on Windows.

smcameron 6y ago
Thanks for the informative reply. > and web browsers do a great job. Suppose one had a native linux game that uses POSIX, OpenGL and SDL. Is there any hope?
- gary_0 6y ago
  Having given the apelife source a glance, it seems quite possible to me; it already shows you how to create a window on Win32. And SDL2 has already been ported to Emscripten/WASM after all, and OpenGL is really no trouble, since it's usually accessed through a mostly platform-agnostic C API wrapper already (see for example, https://github.com/Dav1dde/glad https://github.com/Dav1dde/glad ). And maybe you could use MinGW to support POSIX on Win32...
- mst 6y ago
  Now I want to see somebody better at C than me try smashing cosmopolitan and the C version of Dear Imgui together and see what happens.
mhd 6y ago
Regarding consensus desktop APIs, maybe it's time to re-invent/-introduce Win32s ;) (Although adding that to the library would add considerable bloat, and cross-platform runtime dynamic linking or a "dynamic polyfill" might be a bit beyond the scope of this) Or raw X11 protocol, of course (WSL made X11 servers on Win10 quite common, and . If that wouldn't be so horrible, it would be interesting how small one could get basic widgets starting from scratch.
- Asooka 6y ago
  It should be possible to compile wxWidgets with Cosmopolitan, one variant per platform (win32, POSIX/X11, MacOS) and initialise the correct one at runtime depending on where you're launched, no?
- mwcampbell 6y ago
  > it would be interesting how small one could get basic widgets starting from scratch. Please don't do this for any application with a wide audience. Small, simple widgets are missing many important things such as accessibility and internationalization.
  - mhd 6y ago
    Sure, as do most TUIs and a lot of web apps. I'm merely suggesting a hack that goes along with this hack, not the foundation technology for a mono-binary Office clone. Re-inventing the UI wheel seems somewhat common within the Go and Rust communities (as is re-inventing everything else), this would just have raw X11 protocol messages via socket as the foundation layer, not Vulkan/GL/SDL. And there just enough to be useful, e.g. text, input, buttons, canvas… For something more serious, I suggest re-inventing PostScript/NeWs as a service, of course.
    - mwcampbell 6y ago
      > I'm merely suggesting a hack that goes along with this hack, not the foundation technology for a mono-binary Office clone. Sure. I just worry that one person's clever hack will then become another person's indispensable tool, which they'll then impose on their colleagues, employees, or contractors, blocking a third person from doing their job. I know a blind person who temporarily lost his job because his employer's largest client required an application that didn't work with screen readers. So I just want to make sure developers are aware of accessibility, and in general, the risks of reinventing things that are necessarily complex.
mwcampbell 6y ago
> Cosmopolitan even takes care of the chore of translating your UTF-8 strings into UTF-16 when polyfilling functions like open() which delegates to CreateFile() on Windows. That shortcoming of the MSVC runtime has been the bane of multiple projects I've done on Windows. Even without the portable executable trick, Cosmo might be useful as an alternative Windows CRT that can be used with GCC or clang. (Edit: Except that ARM64 Windows is now a thing, whereas Cosmo seems to assume the continued hegemony of x86-64.)