Justine Tunney - Redbean and the Actually Portable Executable (Speakeasy JS, May 2021) - Despite the channel, this is about a C executable that "runs anywhere", including from boot
Justine Tunney - Redbean and the Actually Portable Executable (Speakeasy JS, May 2021) - Despite the channel, this is about a C executable that "runs anywhere", including from boot
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.
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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."
Yea, I forget where, but she's openly lamented the rise of ARM for this reason. Not because it's a small blemish on redbean and cosmopolitan libc (what redbean uses to be "universal") ... but, IIRC, x86 had gained such ubiquity that simply sticking with it for the sake of interoperability and backwards compatibility was/is probably worth it. However accurate that is, or viable in today's tech world, I certainly resonate with the sentiment. And given what her and cosmopolitan libc seem to have accomplished (I've never used these things), it certainly seems like one of nice things we could have if we just did things in a nicer way.
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 Ξ±cΟ¡αlly pΞ΄rΟΞ±blΞ΅ Ξ΅xΞ΅cΒ΅ΟΞ±blΞ΅. 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.