4 ms·

The author mentions the portable binary is smaller than the original. It seems Cosmopolitan's output is actually an executable pkzip file: https://justine.lol/a

• comex 6y ago
  That's how I read it the first time through, but on a closer look, they're not comparing a normal native binary to an APE binary. They're comparing an intermediate step of the APE build process to the final output. `objcopy -S -O binary` does two things. One is to strip all the ELF headers and just dump the section contents into an output file. It looks like the input to this command is an executable within an executable, with the BIOS boot sector, ELF segments, Mach-O headers, etc. all embedded as section contents within an outer ELF file; objcopy then removes the outer shell. Clearly a necessary step, but it won't make much difference in binary size. However, the `-S` tells objcopy to strip debug information, which is included in the original since `-g` was passed to `gcc`. This is presumably responsible for almost all of the difference; debug info is notoriously huge. You can get a similar size reduction in a normal compilation by running `strip`. Edit: But objcopy does not do anything fancy like compress the input. It looks like the pkzip part only contains associated files the binary might need (e.g. "hellojs.com" contains a JavaScript file and time zone files), not the executable code itself.