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> One use case is where the source and target are different architectures, and either the target does not have a compiler installed or the source does not have a cross-compiler installed.

Do you mean different OSes? AFAIK, Cosmopolitan isn't cross-architecture.

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IIRC it involves qemu on aarch64

Gotcha. That still runs counter to the comment:

> I do not wish to install Python or Java on every computer. I have small form factor computers where I need to conserve space.

Now you have to install QEMU on every computer, in which case your options for portability dramatically increase.

You can always build headless blinkenlights https://justine.lol/blinkenlights/index.html (part of the cosmo codebase) for aarch64 or whatever and use that to simulate ape binaries. If you make -j12 MODE=tiny o/tiny/tool/build/tinyemu.com it's 191kb and that simulates the whole x86_64 ring 3 architecture up to ssse3, plus enough of ring 0 currently for the cosmo codebase to have metal unit tests. The APE blog post talks about the possibility of embedding something like that inside these x86 binaries. So if you feel really strongly about non-x86 as many of the people in this thread do, then 90% of the work has been done for you. I haven't taken it 100% of the way there since I personally don't need non-x86 support.

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