I think improving performance on other architectures is great. There's nothing that inherently limits the Actually Portable Executable format from baking in native support for other architectures. It's simply a question of focus.
What Cosmopolitan does, it does really well. No other C library is able to target multiple operating systems and all the x86 microarchitectures. You can now easily distribute software that can be easily run on the vast majority of PCs and servers. Want it to do more? Consider becoming a sponsor. The impact the project is already having should be all the proof we need that it could be doing much more. In order for that to happen it needs your support.
By "baking in native support for other architectures", I guess you're thinking of an approach similar to Apple's "fat binaries", which are just multiple independent binaries built for different architectures bundled together? That's a good pragmatic option, and definitely the best choice size-wise for small programs. On the other hand, it lacks forwards-compatibility: you're limited to the set of architectures the original developer decided on. And for large programs, the cost of N copies of the program can add up.
Personally, I'm a fan of bytecode VMs such as WebAssembly. That way the binary can be truly architecture-independent, capable of supporting many different architectures or special architecture variants without bloating the size of the executable. On the other hand, if you wanted the binary to run out of the box with no dependencies, you would have to bundle an entire VM implementation into the binary for at least some architectures, and then you'd have your own share of "hello world" bloat. (I'm assuming there would be an option for the user to supply their own VM for less common architectures.)
I do wonder how small one can make a WebAssembly VM, if its design prioritizes minimal size over maximal speed, while still aiming to get reasonable speed (i.e. not an interpreter)…
Optionally you could consider a binary that on first run (&prompt?) removes the binaries irrelevant to the current host.
Keep in mind this compiler doesn't optimize. So if you're OK taking a 2x performance hit, you're going to find that your code compiles significantly faster than GCC or Clang and you're going to have the convenience of the fact that the whole toolchain will be a single .com file that you can just scp on any server for a fully deterministic reproducible build experience. It's also the most readable and hackable compiler codebase I've ever seen, so if you've ever wanted to pull out the dragon book at try your hand at optimizing, you'll find that chibicc is fertile ground to do it.
git clone https://github.com/jart/cosmopolitan
cd cosmopolitan
make -j8
o/third_party/chibicc/chibicc.com -include libc/integral/normalize.inc -o hello.com.dbg examples/hello.c o/cosmopolitan.a
o/third_party/gcc/bin/x86_64-linux-musl-objcopy -SO binary hello.com.dbg hello.com
./hello.comHow?
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This is revisionism. It ended with the smartphone and netbook era, both of which put more ARM devices in homes than Macs ever will.
By "everything that mattered" I guess I should have said "everything that mattered that you have a shell on".
For some of those non-desktop-operating-system devices, getting a shell is impossible without bypassing lockdown measures. For others, it's possible, but not particularly common as far as I know, for a variety of reasons. They tend to run stripped-down OSes; they don't have great keyboards; they were pretty slow compared to desktops until recently.
Yes, this is a huge overgeneralization. Plenty of people do run shells on their phones or routers. But I do believe that a major desktop platform switching to ARM is qualitatively different from what we'd seen before.
The EeePC was x86, the Chromebook Pixel was x86 along with many that followed with balance being ARM variants.
More recently you have convertibles/ultrabooks and their stripped down cousins (e.g. Microsoft Surface Pro vs. Surface 3/Go/Go 2 and Surface 2, Surface RT, and Surface Pro X the latter 3 being ARM).
Ultimately the netbook niche has been squeeze by ultrabooks and tablets to few offerings if anyone is even bothering to market computers that way anymore.
It's a fun project, but I don't think the assumption that everything is x86 is as safe as the author proposes.
* on x86.
There was a time period when it was reasonable to just assume everything that mattered was x86. It started sometime in the early 2000s, as non-x86 servers died out and Macs switched to x86. And it ended last November, when Apple announced Macs would switch to ARM.
The author has suggested sticking with x86 and handling other architectures using emulation. But x86 is the worst possible architecture to emulate, because its strong memory ordering model means that emulators on other architectures essentially must limit the emulated process to a single core. (Unless you have special hardware support like M1 Macs do… for now.) Also, any hardware CPU architecture is going to be slower to emulate than a purpose-built bytecode – and we already have a good enough bytecode, WebAssembly.
Emulating x86 might make sense anyway if you assume that x86 is and will be the norm, and non-x86 an edge case that can afford to take a performance hit. But that sure doesn't seem to be the way the wind is blowing.
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