Patching GCC to Build Portable Executables

• cosmopolitan

  201 15,067 9.8 C

  build-once run-anywhere c library

New constants do make compilation a lot easier, but my personal opinion is that the overhead to convert to/from the old constants during runtime is too much.

Look at the list of constants here: https://github.com/jart/cosmopolitan/blob/master/libc/sysv/c...

Every time I used any of these constants, I'd have to load a whole bunch of them into my binary as a large lookup table, and go through that table every time I needed a check in my program. It might not be that slow, but I believe it would definitely be noticeable.

My goal was to make porting easier without changing a lot of source code in either the libc or in the software I was trying to port, and still produce binaries that are close or better in performance. Under those constraints, this gcc patch seemed like the best way to simplify the process.

If I run into enough codebases where SIGHUP is used as an array index initializer, I will probably attempt your suggestion just to measure the tradeoffs. Or you could try it out and let me know if a separate set of constants is better.

• superconfigure

  3 129 9.6 Makefile

  wrap autotools configure scripts to build with Cosmopolitan Libc

I wrote this post: the title should be "Patching GCC to build Actually Portable Executables", because it refers to Cosmopolitan Libc and jart's Actually Portable Executable format.

With my gcc patch, you can now build software like vim, emacs, ninja, bash, git, gcc etc with Cosmopolitan Libc, via their usual autotools/cmake-style build system. The built executables should run on Linux, FreeBSD, MacOS, OpenBSD, NetBSD, and also Windows (although I haven't tested Windows yet.)

Here's a list of software I got to build with this technique: https://github.com/ahgamut/superconfigure

The superconfigure script is just a wrapper around the usual configure script used to build your software, supplying flags like --enable-static.

If you want to build gcc using Cosmopolitan Libc -- try out this repo: https://github.com/ahgamut/musl-cross-make/tree/gccbuild

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• musl-cross-make

  1 9 0.0

  Simple makefile-based build for musl cross compiler (by ahgamut)

I wrote this post: the title should be "Patching GCC to build Actually Portable Executables", because it refers to Cosmopolitan Libc and jart's Actually Portable Executable format.

With my gcc patch, you can now build software like vim, emacs, ninja, bash, git, gcc etc with Cosmopolitan Libc, via their usual autotools/cmake-style build system. The built executables should run on Linux, FreeBSD, MacOS, OpenBSD, NetBSD, and also Windows (although I haven't tested Windows yet.)

Here's a list of software I got to build with this technique: https://github.com/ahgamut/superconfigure

The superconfigure script is just a wrapper around the usual configure script used to build your software, supplying flags like --enable-static.

If you want to build gcc using Cosmopolitan Libc -- try out this repo: https://github.com/ahgamut/musl-cross-make/tree/gccbuild

• go

  2,068 119,564 10.0 Go

  The Go programming language

  

There is a ticket in Go's repo about this: https://github.com/golang/go/issues/51900

• gcc

  1 14 0.0

Dereferencing the runtime symbol with a function sounds interesting! If you can show me an example of where it works, I'd be happy to try it out. I like the if-else-goto arrangement because it fit in perfectly with the other parts of gcc -- if you look at my patch[1], you will find that I had to change very little of gcc's existing code to add this capability.

[1]: https://github.com/ahgamut/gcc/tree/portcosmo-11.2

• rust-ape-example

  3 171 4.9 Rust

  A simple example with Rust and Cosmopolitan Libc

I did that last year :) https://github.com/ahgamut/rust-ape-example

• ripgrep

  1 18 8.6 Rust

  ripgrep recursively searches directories for a regex pattern while respecting your gitignore (by ahgamut)

Also got ripgrep to work: https://github.com/ahgamut/ripgrep/tree/cosmopolitan

Might need to update the build scripts a little to handle the latest updates in Rust and Cosmo (we'll need gcc-11 now), but I expect to get Rust working again soon enough.

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• lnav

  75 6,686 9.5 C++

  Log file navigator

I use an APE executable as an agent for communicating with remote hosts in the Logfile Navigator (https://lnav.org). While lnav itself is not built as an APE, the agent built into itself is. That agent is transferred to the remote when the user wants to read logs on that host. This way, there is no extra step to determine the type of OS or building in multiple versions of the executable. Here's a short blog post on the subject:

https://lnav.org/2021/05/03/tailing-remote-files.html

• cosmonim

  3 116 2.5 Nim

  A Nim template to compile your code with the Cosmopolitan libc

I haven't used Nim much, but I remember a repo on Github had setup a build script for compiling Nim with Cosmopolitan Libc. https://github.com/Yardanico/cosmonim

This gcc patch makes such build scripts simpler, because you will need to change less of your code -- let me know how it works!

• blink

  28 6,700 7.9 C

  tiniest x86-64-linux emulator

> Consider offering APE for x64 but then still producing ARM binaries the old fashioned way.

The recent version of cosmopolitan generates ARM binaries for Linux and MacOS (https://github.com/jart/cosmopolitan#arm; mode aarch64). There is also blink that provides the x86-64 emulation layer for (APE and other) binaries on a variety of platforms (https://github.com/jart/blink).

Suggest a related project