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What's funny is we've tried so many different, "better" solutions to build once, run anywhere. I truly love Inferno - learned SO much reading the dis VM bytecod

What's funny is we've tried so many different, "better" solutions to build once, run anywhere. I truly love Inferno - learned SO much reading the dis VM bytecode spec; JVM was and still is a thing; there's even .NET IR which was built with the specific, explicit goal of getting JIT'ted for the target CPU. The two de-facto solutions ended up being: - win32/wine; - Linux emulation - the kernel itself has an incredibly stable interface, but you basically need to ship an entire RHEL/Ubuntu installation on top. My sincere hope is that APE/Cosmopolitan takes off and eats everyone's lunch AND the table. It even recently got some funding - turns out it's the easiest way to ship LLM models (finally something good may come out of this hype cycle).

AshamedCaptain 3y ago
The kernel does _not_ have an incredibly stable interface. It is in the fact part of the reason older statically linked versions of glibc no longer work. I personally count at least two breaking changes, and only one of them got an option in Kconfig (which was related to ASLR iirc, so distros rushed to enable the "break compatibility" option). . Yet another example dynamic linking almost always makes things easier for your future users, despite the preconceptions. Just grep your kernel's Kconfig for "ancient" -- the euphemism every developer uses to refer to stuff they don't care about and want to break. Also, stuff in /proc, /sys, or the like is moving every other day, and some programs depend on it (sigh).
pjmlp 3y ago
Cosmopolitan only works for basic C APIs, for example working with 3D API, talking to game controllers over LE Bluetooth. JVM is doing quite alright across desktop, servers, embedded and 80% of mobile phones. .NET less so due to Microsoft's strategy error to bind it to Windows. Still nowadays my .NET workflow is exactly like my Java one. Work on Windows, deploy where needed. I don't think in POSIX since 2006.

AshamedCaptain 3y ago

The kernel does _not_ have an incredibly stable interface. It is in the fact part of the reason older statically linked versions of glibc no longer work. I personally count at least two breaking changes, and only one of them got an option in Kconfig (which was related to ASLR iirc, so distros rushed to enable the "break compatibility" option). . Yet another example dynamic linking almost always makes things easier for your future users, despite the preconceptions. Just grep your kernel's Kconfig for "ancient" -- the euphemism every developer uses to refer to stuff they don't care about and want to break. Also, stuff in /proc, /sys, or the like is moving every other day, and some programs depend on it (sigh).

pjmlp 3y ago

Cosmopolitan only works for basic C APIs, for example working with 3D API, talking to game controllers over LE Bluetooth. JVM is doing quite alright across desktop, servers, embedded and 80% of mobile phones. .NET less so due to Microsoft's strategy error to bind it to Windows. Still nowadays my .NET workflow is exactly like my Java one. Work on Windows, deploy where needed. I don't think in POSIX since 2006.