> Fundamentally, a C binary will not run on multiple architectures (at least not without some sort of special translation mechanism like Rosetta or qemu user-mo

> Fundamentally, a C binary will not run on multiple architectures (at least not without some sort of special translation mechanism like Rosetta or qemu user-mode emulation). The C machine model doesn't dictate native compilation. You could (and in fact IBM OS/400 does[0]) compile C to a binary format that does run on multiple architectures. Maybe instead of "C binary" you meant "C compiled to native binary", but that linguistic shortcut also encourages a mental shortcut that excludes several interesting design tradeoffs. In the IBM TIMI case, the equivalent of setting the execute bit on the binary triggers OS/400 to perform the native code generation and save that native code to disk, similar to some versions of Android Runtime, but without mandatory garbage collection. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_i#TIMI https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_i#TIMI