I really like your view of the world, that programs should be portable, tiny, and just work. The slamming of so much functionality into a zip file is inspiring.
Would it be possible to do something similar with Free Pascal, allowing the recreation of something like Turbo Pascal, except really, really portable .com output?
Author here. Absolutely. I used to love Turbo Pascal and Delphi when I was younger. If Free Pascal uses GNU LD.BFD or LLVM LLD when it links programs, then all you'd need to do is is configure it to use cosmopolitan.a when linking system call functions like read(), write(), etc. See https://github.com/jart/cosmopolitan Another option is if Free Pascal wants to write all the system call support from scratch, then doing that now is going to be a whole lot easier since the Cosmopolitan codebase does a really good job documenting all the magic numbers you'll need. See files like https://github.com/jart/cosmopolitan/blob/master/libc/sysv/s... and https://github.com/jart/cosmopolitan/blob/master/libc/sysv/c... I've been working on a tiny C11 compiler called chibicc which has most GNU extensions and I managed to get it working as an actually portable executable with an integrated assembler: https://github.com/jart/cosmopolitan/blob/master/third_party... I also got Antirez's KILO text editor working as an APE binary. https://github.com/jart/cosmopolitan/blob/master/examples/ki... If we can build a linker too then we can get a freestanding single file toolchain + ide that's able to be a modern version of Turbo C.