Video is nearly 3 years old now, but I think it’s worth watching. Her presentation starts at around 2:30.
Basically, she explains how Redbean, a tiny (~450kb) and very fast C http server, works and how the same executable can be used to deploy it on most operating systems (she starts explaining that around 14:30)
Justine is also the mind behind Sector LISP, Lambda Calculus in 383 bytes, considerable optimizations to LLamaAI, plus several other things.
What she’s accomplished is, to me, astonishing and an impressive intellectual feat. I believe there’s a pretty big caveat that it only works on x86_64, i.e. not ARM. The latter being fairly popular and not uncommon.
It wouldn’t damage the impressiveness of her achievement to say “most OSes on x86.”
No, it also works for ARM - you can even build a fat binary with an ARM -> x86 translation layer, i.e. one binary for both architectures!
Huh. In was just playing around with some samples from her page, and can’t get them to run on either AMD64 or ARM. What’s worst is that on my AMD machine I have Wine installed, and trying to run it fires up Wine (where it does eventually execute). You’re supposed to also be able to
shit, and if I do that they just fail. On an ARM, they just fail. I was unable to get any of the samples from he page to run.I haven’t tried compiling my own program, but if the download samples don’t run (for me), it doesn’t give me confidence in the solution.
I just tried the current redbean build on Linux AMD64, and everything worked as expected (both launching directly, and through
sh). Which examples did you specifically try? Whichshversion do you use (I have5.2.26(1)-release (x86_64-redhat-linux-gnu))?The
cosmopolitanREADME has a section on the WINE thing, if you want to try and get it running.I tried all of the examples from her page about αcτµαlly pδrταblε εxεcµταblε. It looks like the page was written in 2020, so I’m assuming the binaries were compiled then, but that shouldn’t matter; I have Go binaries I built in 2021 that still run, and I have no doubt that it I could find an even older binary, they’d run too.
Those were their first tests, of course there is a high chance they won’t run on all system configurations (especially since things like WINE comparability were likely detailed later). You should try artifacts built with the current version of the format (3 IIRC) if you want to give it a fair shot.
Good to know, thanks.
I remember seeing something like this a while ago. Maybe she rediscovered the hack to make multiplatform executables on her own or she was inspired. nexe has existed for 11 years now.
That nexe looks nothing like cosmopolitan. Nexe compiles a node.js into a single exe for Windows and, from the readme, can create native binaries for other distributions (Linux, Mac), something that isn’t new to Nexe, you could do that with FreePascal way before Nexe. If you avoided OS specific calls, you could pull that since the early 90s with C, too.
Compiling the same codebase for N different platforms, generating N different native binaries, isn’t the same as having one single executable file that runs out of the box on significantly different OSs. Put it another way, she made a java that works without needing a JRE or JDK installed.
🤔 I swear I’ve seen this multiplatform single executable before. Maybe nexe isn’t it, but as soon as she whipped out the hexcode and talking about binary headers, it felt more than a dejavu. Someone did it years ago, put it in github, and it was called an abomination.
It’s very similar in vein to this script that can be executed by bash and powershell.
If you do find it, be sure to tell, I’d love to take a look
By “several other things” I presume you mean the cryptofascism.
Excuse me, what?
She’s a well-known well-documented part of the Silicon Valley cryptofascist movement. Her project names, like “cosmopolitan” and “ape”, are dog whistles.
Well, shit. The fuck am I supposed to do?
