Comment by jart | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jart | Hacker News Reader

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Author here. Thanks! The other projects I'm known for here on HN are:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26271117 Redbean (2011) is a single file distributable web server. Here's a video of me giving a talk about it https://youtu.be/1ZTRb-2DZGs

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24256883 αcτµαlly pδrταblε εxεcµταblε (2020) lets you build c/c++/fortran/etc. code so that it runs on seven operating systems

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13769727 Operation Rosehub (2017) where I helped save a lot of people from an Apache security bug similar to Log4j issue today

I like doing these projects because they all fit together so well into a consistent story. For example, a lot of these past projects were what helped to make SectorLISP better. Thanks to APE you now have a 20kb quickly deployable and embeddable LISP interpreter. Thanks to Redbean we're going to have an online pastebin service that'll let you publish SectorLISP gists in a few days, for example: https://lisp.pub/1

Thank you Hacker News community for being so supportive and encouraging.

Congratulations on all your progress especially creating the worlds tiniest programming language in the world with GC!

Hey, i have a question regarding your projects! and before that, i am a huge fan of redbean, this is so cool! as long as the world has also people like you with that cool stuff in it, there's still some fun and hope in the world.

but for the question: for your projects, do you have like a stable buildplatform (like nixos, minimal debian stable or sth like that) for which you publish your build instructions for your project?

I used to do a lot of work on Bazel. I wrote its downloader code for example. https://github.com/bazelbuild/bazel/commit/ed7ced0018dc5c5eb... Bazel is nice, but these days I'm running a small scrappy operation, so I just use GNU Make. https://github.com/jart/cosmopolitan/blob/7064d736e3ded15087...

I like Make since it's able to build a repository with 17k .o files, 80 .a archives, and 661 .com executables from scratch in under a minute on one personal computer (if the kernel page cache is warm). I wrote a couple small helper commands to make the make config more manageable, like package.com, mkdeps.com, compile.com, ar.com, zipobj.com, and runit.com.

The reason why Make works for me, is because I think the root cause of needing things like Autoconf and Cmake is because most projects need to depend on seven different C libraries. I decided that, rather than focusing on writing a better build config, I'd rather use an unfancy build system and instead devote my energy towards having a single C library that runs on all seven of the platforms I'm targeting. I owe a lot of thanks to projects like musl, dlmalloc, dtoa, llvm, etc. from whom I borrowed source code. That enabled me to abstract portability at the libc level, rather than punting to #ifdefs and configs.

Beautifully executed. I aspire to solve my problems with such grace. It's difficult and i fail often but not without trying.

How do I get you interested in the Nix ecosystem? It's a great sandbox for all sorts of portability and bootstrapping experiments.

Awesome work, and very enjoyable to read, kudos!

> αcτµαlly pδrταblε εxεcµταblε

You mean ακτυαλλγ πορταβλε εχεκυταβλε?

Shouldn't it be: πορταμπλε (since β actually is a "v" sound so μπ is used for our "b")

Was going for visual resemblance, but certainly!

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