Comment by userbinator | Hacker News Reader

Comment by userbinator | Hacker News Reader

IMHO this is one of the OSes with the weirdest decisions I've seen on here. I do agree with using PE instead of ELF, as the dynamic linking situation of the latter (and Unix-likes in general) is, to put it bluntly, a horrid mess.

The POSIX functions are split over ucrtbase, iphlpapi, and ws2_32, as on Windows, with anything that Windows doesn't implement put in mnposix.

LOL. POSIX in ucrtbase! Those are words that I never expected to see together.

I used AI to help with the mechanical parts of porting

I feel like it won't be long before someone comes up with a crazy chimera of an OS that can run DOS, Windows, Linux, BSD, and macOS binaries. It doesn't look like AI is replacing software developers, but rather boosting them quite significantly; there seems to be a lot of activity and new projects I've seen recently from many who aren't even using AI themselves, but must be somehow being inspired by others to do more.

As historical note, not all UNIXes use ELF, not only that came later in UNIX and related clones evolution, some of them like z/UNIX and Aix have gone for a PE like format, COFF.

So in those platforms you can also enjoy having private symbols by default, delayed loading on first call, and the joy of import files.

> I feel like it won't be long before someone comes up with a crazy chimera of an OS that can run DOS, Windows, Linux, BSD, and macOS binaries.

This is the future, imho: some tiny, cross-platform, ultra-reliable kernel (like seL4), a set of shims that offer different sets of APIs (OS "personalities" if you will) to apps, an emulator, VM or binary translation layer here & there, all happily living under the same roof.

*BSD (including Linux compat layer) + Wine + some emulators like DOSBox already goes a long way. MS Windows desktop running on top of Linux isn't outside the realm of the possible either. And be sure to check Genode OS.

Fun times ahead!

> it won't be long before someone comes up with a crazy chimera of an OS that can run DOS, Windows, Linux, BSD, and macOS binaries

TBF, the only missing part of this is that Darling isn't developed enough to run many Darwin programs; otherwise you can have that today by installing WINE+DOSBox+Darling on Linux or your pick of *BSD or illumos. (Well, running *BSD programs on other systems is a weak point, but otherwise.)

>LOL. POSIX in ucrtbase! Those are words that I never expected to see together.

There's nothing in Moxnox ucrtbase that's not also in Windows ucrtbase. open(), read(), and write() are all POSIX functions in ucrtbase.

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