ohrrpgce VS lone

Yes, I guess I could do that, then maybe I can get it upstreamed.

However I was misremembering a bit and misspoke before both about how easy it's been to support Windows 95 (it was easy up until a few mingw-w64 releases ago... except for spawning processes) and how recent my mingw-w64 is (I'm using 7.0.0, 3.5 years old, and simply haven't tried anything newer). Also I have no idea the minimum Windows targetted by mingw-w64 actually is, they don't say. I think they don't actually care about Windows 9x support, they just never did anything to break it before 6.0.0. So I doubt they'd accept such a patch.

The most important trick was you have to use a build of mingw-w64 with 'win32' rather than 'posix' threading ([1], and the rest of that thread is relevant too):

> the 'win32' threading support in mingw-w64 is the original one and supports all 32-bit Windows, while 'posix' threading (winpthreads) is a recent addition which is necessary to support C++11 mutexes and threads, but has higher system requirements. ... That's why mxe switched to posix threads by default in 2019.

[1] https://github.com/ohrrpgce/ohrrpgce/issues/1241#issuecommen...

I made something somewhat close to that: a freestanding lisp. It targets the Linux kernel directly. No libc.

https://github.com/lone-lang/lone

> register scanning isn't portable

Certainly not but it wasn't particularly hard to implement either. I just wrote some inline assembly for every architecture. Here's my programming language's x86_64 and aarch64 implementations:

https://github.com/lone-lang/lone/blob/master/architecture/x...

https://github.com/lone-lang/lone/blob/master/architecture/a...

Not too long ago, a project of mine was shared here on HN.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38126052

In that thread I wrote:

> I have this vision in my mind: embedding lone modules into sections of the lone ELF and shipping it out. Zero dependencies, self-contained.

I've been working on that since that day. Proud to say I've gotten it to work and thought I'd make it the subject of my first Show HN. Some free software projects gained features along the way too.

The link is to an article with a proper demonstration, technical details and what happened in the past few weeks.

The complete repository itself can be found here:

https://github.com/lone-lang/lone

I've completely reorganized it since the last thread. Would be very happy if you guys tried it out.

To test my programming language. It's a freestanding lisp interpreter that doesn't link to libc. I wrote the code that handles the environment variables and in order to test it I needed full control over the program's inputs including its environment. The env utility provides this control by emptying the environment and setting only the variables I specify, solving 90% of the problem. Only thing I still can't control is argv[0]. With this new feature upstreamed, my test suite will be complete.

Here's the code if you'd like to take a look:

https://github.com/lone-lang/lone#testing

https://github.com/lone-lang/lone/blob/master/scripts/test.b...

> only to be confronted with the notorious 'incompatible glibc version error'. It's super annoying.

I started making my own freestanding Linux Lisp because of this exact issue. It's nowhere near as performant as something like SBCL but it's small and once compiled has no dependencies and will literally run on any Linux.

https://github.com/lone-lang/lone

I'm taking a break from this project but I plan to add a feature where I can put a Lisp script into the ELF itself so I can just copy it with the scripts included.

The kernel just puts the data contiguously on the stack. Obtaining pointers to them can seem somewhat magical if you're writing a nolibc program but I wouldn't call it horrible.

I implemented it for my programming language with some rather simple assembly code:

https://github.com/lone-lang/lone/blob/master/arch/x86_64.c#...

https://github.com/lone-lang/lone/blob/master/arch/aarch64.c...