7 ms·

So on the one hand, all this Cosmo/ape/redbean stuff sounds incredible, and the comments on these articles are usually pretty positive and don’t generally debun

• almostgotcaught 2y ago
  > So I’ve gotta ask: Is there a catch? Are these tools doing something evil to achieve what they’re achieving? it's not that complicated; they're fat binaries (plus i guess a lot of papering over the differences between the platforms) that exploit a quirk of tshell: > One day, while studying old code, I found out that it's possible to encode Windows Portable Executable files as a UNIX Sixth Edition shell script, due to the fact that the Thompson Shell didn't use a shebang line. (https://justine.lol/ape.html https://justine.lol/ape.html) so the answer is simple: i can't think of anyone that wants to ship fat binaries.
  • fragmede 2y ago
    Anyone focused on customer experience wants to ship a binary that just works, without customers having to know what a fat binary even is.
    • thefaux 2y ago
      I don't think macos will allow you to run a downloaded cosmo binary without going into security settings and enabling it. That's not an experience I'd want my customers to have personally which means if you care about mac normies, this isn't a viable approach.
      • fragmede 2y ago
        I don't know what magic is involved, but I was able to download eg https://cosmo.zip/pub/cosmos/bin/md5sum https://cosmo.zip/pub/cosmos/bin/md5sum and run it in a terminal without having to do run 'xattr -d com.apple.quarantine' on it.
    • bluGill 2y ago
      Unless the customer is one who has issues with large downloads. Not everyone has fiber to the home with massive storage on modern computers. Some people have the entry level systems, settle for slow internet. Often they are in poor or "third world" places which means maybe you don't care about them, but they exist.
      • 01HNNWZ0MV43FF 2y ago
        Fat binaries are fine. Electron is a fat binary in a different sense.
      • 0cf8612b2e1e 2y ago
        Given how fat modern websites are, compassion for the bandwidth deprived seems rare.
        • bluGill 2y ago
          Very much. Which is really a problem for those who do have bandwidth limitations. Or even low end phones / old computers. Or even new computers that are not very powerful.
  • cycomanic 2y ago
    Correct me if I'm wrong, but I always thought Apple universal binaries are fat binaries? So why did Apple build this ability if nobody wants it?
    • almostgotcaught 2y ago
      > So why did Apple build this ability if nobody wants it? did you miss the part where they transitioned from x86 to arm64 in 2020?
      • cycomanic 2y ago
        I don't get your point. People were arguing that one doesn't need fat binaries because cross compiling and having different binaries is fine. Apple clearly thought differently when they transitioned from x86 to arm (not their first architecture transition either). So now you're saying because apple finished the transition fat binaries are useless again? What about other platforms?
        • almostgotcaught 2y ago
          > finished the transition fat binaries are useless again? yup that's exactly what i'm saying.
        • oriolid 2y ago
          > apple finished the transition fat binaries are useless again? Is the transition really finished? I'm writing this on a x86_64 Macbook with a browser that is distributed as x86_64/arm64 universal binary.
      • E39M5S62 2y ago
        And PowerPC to x86 before that.
    • yencabulator 2y ago
      Apple's fat binaries were never very "universal". They put in a codepath where macOS detects and handles macOS-arm-and-x86_64 binaries. That is something where they can support both variants, and themselves in control. Cosmopolitan libc is a pile of hacks, compared to that, more comparable to somebody making Linux boot on a 4004 CPU than what Apple did.
• amiga386 2y ago
  APE works through cunning trickery that might get patched out any day now (and in OpenBSD, it has been). Most people producing cross-platform software don't want a single executable that runs on every platform, they want a single codebase that works correctly on each platform they support. With that in mind that respect, languages like go letting you cross compile for all your targets (provided you avoid CGO) is delightful... but the 3-ways-executable magic trick of APE, while really clever, doesn't inspire confidence it'll work forever, and for the most part it doesn't gain you anything. Each platform has their own packaging/signing requirements. You might as well compile a different target for each platform.
  • 0x1ceb00da 2y ago
    Wasn't elf format modified by upstream to accomodate for cosmo? That makes it kinda official. Still hard to see a use case for it. If you want everyone to be able to run your program, just write a web app, a win32 program, or a java applet. 20 years old java applets still run on modern JVMs.
    • bcoates 2y ago
      You can't reasonably assume the end user system has a system JVM installed (they probably don't, in fact) so they're not really an alternative to a fat binary -- if you can install dependencies, you can just pick a single-target binary while you're at it.
      • bpfrh 2y ago
        but you can provide that JVM for different plattforms in a zip file/installer. The more difficult problem with cross plattform apps are always native look and feel and calling native apis in an idiomatic and performant ways.
    • bmacho 2y ago
      Justine has similar claims about POSIX allowing binary in shell scripts now > This is an idea whose time has come; POSIX even changed their rules about binary in shell scripts specifically to let us do it. https://justine.lol/cosmo3/ https://justine.lol/cosmo3/ > Jilles Tjoelker from the FreeBSD project played an instrumental role in helping me to get the POSIX rules changed to allow binary in shell scripts, which is what made this project possible. https://justine.lol/ape.html https://justine.lol/ape.html but that's not true, as recently discussed here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41636569 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41636569
• jkachmar 2y ago
  reposting my comment from another time this discussion came up: "Cosmopolitan has basically always felt like the interesting sort of technical loophole that makes for a fun blog post which is almost guaranteed to make it to the front page of HN (or similar) purely based in ingenuity & dedication to the bit. as a piece of foundational technology, in the way that `libc` necessarily is, it seems primarily useful for fun toys and small personal projects. with that context, it always feels a little strange to see it presented as a serious alternative to something like `glibc`, `musl`, or `msvcrt`; it’s a very cute hack, but if i were to find it in something i seriously depend on i think i’d be a little taken aback."
  • wmf 2y ago
    But what's actually bad about it?
  • sublimefire 2y ago
    The problem with this take is that it is not grounded in facts that should determine if the thing is good or bad. Logically having one thing instead of multiple makes sense as it simplifies the distribution and bytes stored/transmitted. I think the issue here is that it is not time tested. I believe multiple people in various places around the globe think about it and will try to test it. With time this will either bubble up or be stale.
• blenderob 2y ago
  > Is there a catch? I am only speaking for myself here. While cosmo and ape do seem very clever, I do not need this type of clever stuff in my work if the ordinary stuff already works fine. Like for example if I can already cross-compile my project to other OSes and platforms or if I've got the infra to build my project for other OSes and platforms, I've no reason to look for a solution that lets me build one binary that works everywhere. There's also the thing that ape uses clever hacks to be able to run on multiple OSes. What if those hacks break someday due to how executable formats evolve? What if nobody has the time to patch APE to make it compatible with those changes? But my boring tools like gcc, clang, go, rust, etc. will continue to get updated and they will continue to work with evolving OSes. So I just tend to stick with the boring. That's why I don't bother with the clever because the boring just works for me.
  • sublimefire 2y ago
    If the executable format changes then it would affect more than just ape/cosmopolitan. All of the old binaries would just stop working.
    • blenderob 2y ago
      I am not worried about the scenario where the executable format changes breaks old binaries. That is never going to happen. No OS worth its name is going to do that. I am worried about the scenario where the executable format changes just enough to break APE binaries. Like I said, APE uses very clever hacks to make itself work on multiple OSes. It is conceivable that executable formats change just enough that it breaks the clever hacks in APE binaries without breaking old ordinary binaries.
• tangus 2y ago
  Last year I needed to make a small webapp to be hosted on a Windows server, and I thought RedBean would be ideal for it. Unfortunately it was too buggy (at least on Windows). I don't know whether RedBean is production-ready now, but a year and a half ago, that was the catch.
  • jart 2y ago
    Give the latest nightly build a try: https://cosmo.zip/pub/cosmos/bin/ https://cosmo.zip/pub/cosmos/bin/ Windows has been a long hard march, but we've recently hit near feature completion. As of last month, the final major missing piece of the puzzle was implemented, which is the ability to send UNIX signals between processes. Cosmopolitan does such a good job on Windows now that it's not only been sturdy for redbean, but much more mature and complicated software as well, like Emacs, GNU Make, clang, Qt, and more.
• dundarious 2y ago
  Mozilla llamafile uses it. Bundles model weights and an executable into a single file, that can be run from any cosmo/ape platform, and spawns a redbean http server for you to interact with the LLM. Can also run it without the integrated weights, and read weights from the filesystem. It's the easiest "get up and go" for local LLMs you could possibly create.
  • cowsandmilk 2y ago
    Mozilla’s llamafile is primarily developed by jart. I wouldn’t view it as anyone else actually using cosmo/ape
    • dundarious 2y ago
      Yes I should have mentioned that, even when I originally interpreted the OP to be asking about other projects using it, not necessarily other people. But they almost certainly meant other people not other projects, so my point is kind of void. Although in fairness, the Mozilla org choosing Justine/cosmo is basically the kind of sign-off from a 3rd party that OP was looking for.
• sfn42 2y ago
  Most people aren't writing C as far as I know. We use Java, C#, Go, Python etc, some lunatics even use Node. We generally don't care if some mutex is 3x faster than some other mutex. Most of the time if I'm even using a mutex which is rare in itself, the performance of the mutex is generally the least of my concerns. I'm sure it matters to someone, but most people couldn't give two shits if they know what they're doing. We're not writing code where it's going to make a noticeable difference. There are thousands of things in our code we could optimize that would make a greater impact than a faster mutex, but we're not looking at those either because it's fast enough the way it is.
  • secondcoming 2y ago
    What a pointless contribution
    • yas_hmaheshwari 2y ago
      I came here to write this. In such a good discussion thread, this was such a sore thumb
• int_19h 2y ago
  Mozilla has a project called Llamafile (https://github.com/Mozilla-Ocho/llamafile https://github.com/Mozilla-Ocho/llamafile) that's based on Cosmopolitan libc. And they do regularly publish popular models repackaged in that format on Hugging Face: https://huggingface.co/models?search=llamafile https://huggingface.co/models?search=llamafile. Whether that in turn has any practical use beyond quickly trying out small models is another question.
• gavindean90 2y ago
  Tbh I don’t know that there is a catch except that there is one core person behind whole project. I like that there are fresh ideas in the C space.
• deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
• fragmede 2y ago
  > Is the whole thing a tom7-esque joke/troll that I don’t get because I’m not as deep into compilers/runtimes? Or are these really just ingenious tools that haven’t caught on yet? If I went up to you in 2008, and said, hey, lets build a database that doesn't do schemas, isn't relational, doesn't do SQL, isn't ACID compliant, doesn't to joins, has transactions as an afterthought, and only does indexing sometimes, you'd think I was trolling you. And then in 2009, Mongodb came out and caught on in various places. So only time will tell if these are ingenious tools that haven't caught on yet. There's definitely a good amount of genius behind it, though only time will tell if it's remembered in the vein of tom7's harder drives or if it sees wider production use. I'll say that if golang supported it as a platform, I'd switch my build pipelines at work over to it, since it makes their output less complicated to manage as there's only a single binary to deal with instead of 3-4.