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Reading this, I began to think about cosmopolitan libc, and the "actually portable executable".

I haven't played around with it, but I remember being in awe of its ambition.

I haven't been following cosmopolitan, nor blink closely, but I just looked up cosmopolitan and realized you are the author of both.

Just want to say amazing work! Hope to get a chance to try out blink soon.

Somebody should write fanfic where jart goes back in time and forestalls the Java revolution in ~roughly 1995 by releasing Blink. Instead of the entire several decades of Java (and Javascript), Blink becomes the technology underlying web (the browser is really just a portable presentation layer) server and client programming. Lightweight phones with long battery life and portable architectures revolutionize mobile computing 5 years earlier. World GDP is 35% higher, and life is generally happier, and much easier.

(seriously though, thanks for doing all this. I like your philosophy compared to what the world ended up with as the dominant paradigm)

I still find it surreal that these operating systems share so many mechanisms that these portable EXEs are even possible.

Someone should write some kind of historical explanation of how this could have happened. And how critical is it for the "APE" scheme to work? Could APE binaries work on AROS x86_64 for instance? (Without emulation.)

I also find it surreal that it took this long for someone to do something like Actually Portable Executable. I mean, it's slick and easy to use, but I haven't even seem assembler demos of this.

Is the same polyglot EXE possible also on 32-bit x86? If so, I find it even weirder this have not been done long ago, considering the strange hacks people have pulled over the years.

I'm fascinated by the whole thing, as you can tell. Back in the day, Windows and Unix seemed so far from each other, like oil and water.

In this blog post https://justine.lol/sizetricks/#elf I talk about how simple it is to create a single file binary from scratch that runs on Linux, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, and NetBSD. All Actually Portable Executable does is it takes that trick three steps further, to support Windows, MacOS, and BIOS from a single file binary too. That requires a bit more effort.

These are simply the operating systems I knew best, because I grew up using them, and as a result was able to discover the right combination of tricks to get it to work. I'm sure someone else who loves AROS and knows AROS would also be able to discover a way to trick it out so that APE could support it too. Same goes for other platforms. For example, one of the things on my TODO list this year is to find out if the APE x86_64 hacks are replicable for the ARM64 architecture.

The closest thing to a scientific theory behind what APE is would be what the information security community calls a "polyglot". Researching that is another great way to learn more similarly inspired tricks.

> Is the same polyglot EXE possible also on 32-bit x86? If so, I find it even weirder this have not been done long ago, considering the strange hacks people have pulled over the years.

It's actually even easier to do for i386 than it is for x86_64. The blog post above explains why that's the case, due to the syscall magic numbers being more similar. Also I'm equally astonished no one did this before I came along. I think part of why that's the case, is that I couldn't just write APE. Doing this project meant that I had to implement a C library from scratch too, which is a years long coding marathon.

Thanks, great explanations. I think the most astonishing thing to me is that I never saw such a polyglot EXE even print "hello" on stdout, written in assembler.

Nobody dared to eat the fruit of the unknown tree. What if it was poisonous? Until a brave soul tried it, and saw that it was good.

I think for something like AROS the combination of support for ELF and such a small community would mean that if someone wanted to do this for AROS the easier path might well be to add support directly in the loader.

> Blink lets me pull out the virtual machine trick when I need it (e.g. someone wants to run the apps I've released on an esoteric platform like MIPS OpenBSD).

Me and the other user of Mips on OpenBSD are both glad you do!

Which ironically were invented before Java was even an idea.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EM_intermediate_language

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TenDRA_Compiler

curious about "except I want to program in C / C++ instead of Java", does that mean that you prefer writing C code instead of e.g. Rust or Zig? In other words, what is your sincere opinion about Rust or Zig? Thank you!