I just spent 30 minutes reading about this. I'm so shocked that I'm logging in to comment after 5 years of lurking.

Justine has built a c library that allows you compile a binary once and have it run it on any os or baremetal. The SAME binary. Quite frankly, that sentence doesn't even make sense to me.

Check out https://storage.googleapis.com/justine/cosmopolitan/index.ht...

As far as I'm concerned, this is literal magic. Look at the magic numbers: https://github.com/jart/cosmopolitan/blob/37a4c70c3634862d8d...

I could go on, but there's no binary portability comparison with any other language. And she has made some pretty neat optimizations.

Back in the day, I saw some pretty neat stuff with the ELF format, but this takes the cake.

Wow.

Edit: I'm editing because this is just so bloody absurd.

https://storage.googleapis.com/justine/printimage.html

$ ./printimage.com someimage.jpg

Like wow. And also video.

https://storage.googleapis.com/justine/printvideo.html

I'm struggling to put my shock into words. I've been around.

There's engineering. There's academia.

But this falls into straight-up wizardry.

I agree, I got to the page on actually portable executable, and had to read it a few times to make sure I was grokking it properly. This is just sheer cleverness, THIS is the stuff that should be on hacker news!

For real.

It's hard to grok cause there are no words to describe it.

When people say that something is cross-platform, they usually mean a) that the software will build on multiple platforms b) there is some sort of vm which runs the executable (jvm, beam, wasm)

This is the SAME binary. Running everywhere. Could be super-useful as an archival format for mission critical code. sqlite comes to mind.

Maybe it's late at night, but I'm struggling to find a suitable word for the project that is better than portable or cross-platform.

Literally, I can't find a better word than the project name - "actually portable executable."

@author - if you're reading this please set up something for a few bucks a month on your github sponsors. I don't think I have any use for the library, but this is so outrageous it deserves something more than imaginary internet points.