Our great sponsors
-
InfluxDB
Power Real-Time Data Analytics at Scale. Get real-time insights from all types of time series data with InfluxDB. Ingest, query, and analyze billions of data points in real-time with unbounded cardinality.
-
-
pocorgtfo
a "Proof of Concept or GTFO" mirror with an extensive index with also whole issues or individual articles as clean PDFs.
-
WorkOS
The modern identity platform for B2B SaaS. The APIs are flexible and easy-to-use, supporting authentication, user identity, and complex enterprise features like SSO and SCIM provisioning.
Author here. Absolutely. I used to love Turbo Pascal and Delphi when I was younger. If Free Pascal uses GNU LD.BFD or LLVM LLD when it links programs, then all you'd need to do is is configure it to use cosmopolitan.a when linking system call functions like read(), write(), etc. See https://github.com/jart/cosmopolitan Another option is if Free Pascal wants to write all the system call support from scratch, then doing that now is going to be a whole lot easier since the Cosmopolitan codebase does a really good job documenting all the magic numbers you'll need. See files like https://github.com/jart/cosmopolitan/blob/master/libc/sysv/s... and https://github.com/jart/cosmopolitan/blob/master/libc/sysv/c... I've been working on a tiny C11 compiler called chibicc which has most GNU extensions and I managed to get it working as an actually portable executable with an integrated assembler: https://github.com/jart/cosmopolitan/blob/master/third_party... I also got Antirez's KILO text editor working as an APE binary. https://github.com/jart/cosmopolitan/blob/master/examples/ki... If we can build a linker too then we can get a freestanding single file toolchain + ide that's able to be a modern version of Turbo C.
This is something like a "fat binary" with some magic in the header that allows it to run out of the box on Windows and several different UNIXes, a bit like those sneaky shell scripts that run on several platforms[0]. It still needs to include native code for each of the platforms inside the compiled binary, so it's perhaps better to see it a slick packaging/distribution solution for C programmers than a total game changer for developers everywhere.
The more interesting thing I think is the mapping of C library functionality between Linux, BSD and Windows. There have been other attempts to do this, but they never seem to get much traction. I think it's because C programmers tend to get wedded to their OS of choice and then invest time in improving that platform's C libraries. The problem with trying to remain portable with everything is that you tend to be stuck working with the lowest common demoninator functionality, which can be frustrating when doing OS-specific stuff would open up so many more options.
All that said, the cleverness of this project is inspirational in a way that might encourage other programmers to also focus more on building against simple functionality that is truly portable. It shows that you don't need all the bells and whistles to build cool stuff. The feels aligned with early UNIX philosophy and the (more broadly) the hacker ethic, which is why it's neat to see, even if never gets adopted as a mainstream thing.
[0] https://github.com/llamasoft/polyshell
Caddy is a single file web server as well :) https://caddyserver.com/
Admittedly they solve different usecases, where Redbean seems to want to serve a whole static site as a single file, which isn't currently possible with Caddy, (but you can run `caddy file-server` to serve the current directory as a static site), but it may become possible in the future with Golang's new embed package https://golang.org/pkg/embed/
If you want to learn more how these things work I'd highly suggest going through the PoC||GTFO archive (https://github.com/angea/pocorgtfo/blob/master/README.md) and check out entries by Ange Albertini or entries named like "This ZIP is also a PDF".
One small complaint I have is that there is already a popular project called RedBean: https://www.redbeanphp.com/