Cosmopolitan Alternatives

Reviews and mentions

• Enigma Virtual Box – Application Virtualization System for Windows
  5 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 26 Nov 2021
• .NET 6
  18 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 8 Nov 2021

  > You of course have to choose your target platform for this (...)

  https://github.com/jart/cosmopolitan

  (but, yeah, you probably want one version per target, even if hacks are cool)

• SectorLISP binary footprint comparaison
  3 projects | reddit.com/r/lisp | 7 Nov 2021

  Python obviously isn't 14kb because its code is divided into hundreds of shared object files. So the way I like to measure things is using static executable size, using tools like https://github.com/jart/cosmopolitan or https://github.com/richfelker/musl-cross-make of which you'll find a static build in the cosmo repo. For example, here's the technique I used to build TinyLISP was something like this:

• ASCII Paint
  1 project | news.ycombinator.com | 7 Nov 2021

  Awesome website! I once knew a guy who was part of the Blocktronics crew who drew ANSI art painstakingly by hand cell by cell. The amount of effort that goes into these things is something else. There's obviously no algorithm that can produce a finished artwork as beautiful as a human can who sits down and uses a paint prog like this. But... If you want a scriptable tool for the command line that turns the image files you made with photoshop into something that's copy/pastable with UNICODE block characters, then here's an Actually Portable Executable that'll let you do just that.

  Screenshot: https://justine.lol/printansi.png

  Program: https://justine.lol/printansi.com

  Source code: https://github.com/jart/cosmopolitan/blob/master/tool/viz/pr...

• Never Update Anything
  4 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 6 Nov 2021

  Karmic Koala is within the support vector of Actually Portable Executable. Since if you can get it to run on that, it'll most likely run on all the other distros too. Plus these binaries run on Windows 7 and Windows 10 too. Plus Mac and BSDs. No need for recompilation. See https://justine.lol/ape.html and https://github.com/jart/cosmopolitan

• Why is excalidraw so good?
  11 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 4 Nov 2021

  redbean has a https://redbean.dev/#LaunchBrowser function that lets you leverage the highest quality cross-platform gui that's already installed on the user's local machine. Think of it like Electron except with a 1mb install size rather than 100mb. I'm the author and I can tell you cosmo and redbean are ready to serve you, and if they aren't, then I want to know about it.

  We're also working to expand into OpenGL UX too. You can see our latest progress at https://github.com/jacereda/cosmogfx and the screenshots are here https://github.com/jart/cosmopolitan/issues/35#issuecomment-... which we're working hard to polish and get merged into the mainline. If you read threads like https://github.com/jart/cosmopolitan/issues/309 you can see we're committed to making sure your gui apps just work even on traditionally underserved platforms like OpenBSD because our goal is to help you reach the broadest audience possible.

  Please consider supporting the project!

• 🍥 Cross-platform JavaScript rewrite of the GNU Coreutils
  2 projects | reddit.com/r/programmingcirclejerk | 27 Oct 2021
• Will the .exe file I created run on any OS?
  1 project | reddit.com/r/golang | 26 Oct 2021

  This is actually not true, you can have native executables that work on multiple platforms. For example, the αcτµαlly pδrταblε εxεcµταblε format used by the Cosmopolitan project, which runs native code (no VM) on "Linux + Mac + Windows + FreeBSD + OpenBSD + NetBSD + BIOS".

• "Linux malware using subsystem to attack Windows host!"
  3 projects | reddit.com/r/programming | 22 Sep 2021

  Apparently, there's also Cosmopolitan... which is how I found the APE again...through this blog post... about a single binary Lua build.

• The Persistent Gravity of Cross Platform
  4 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 3 Sep 2021

  Check out Cosmopolitan which vendors all its dependencies. https://github.com/jart/cosmopolitan You can't use Node with it, yet, but you can use QuickJS if you `make o//third_party/quickjs/qjs.com` and `o/third_party/quickjs/qjs.com -m third_party/quickjs/repl.js`. Cosmopolitan goes so far with vendoring dependencies that it actually has its own C library implementation that prevents functions like socket(), connect(), and getaddrinfo() from talking to the Internet if the software is running under GNU Make. Since sometimes we've found when porting software it'll have unit tests that do sneak leaks to public servers. It goes without saying that in order to make it even possible to vendor all dependencies, down to the binary level, there's a very long list of topologically ordered things that need to happen before you can even talk to the Internet. https://github.com/jart/cosmopolitan/blob/50937be7524197f23a...

• There is no such thing as a “glibc based alpine image”
  4 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 26 Aug 2021

  This is one of the reasons why I've been building Cosmopolitan Libc. https://github.com/jart/cosmopolitan Alpine and Musl aren't radical enough on the bloat-free angle (since they don't fix root problem which is dynamic shared objects) and their definition of portability is supporting architectures like sega saturn but do nothing to support intel/amd microarchitectural dispatching, which is likely why you encountered performance issues. It's like, I love Musl so much, but I just didn't see the value in being able to port my apps to Sega Saturn if my C Library only runs on Linux and goes slow on x86. That's why we need Cosmopolitan.

• Should Your Web History Impact Your Credit Score? The IMF Thinks So
  1 project | news.ycombinator.com | 24 Aug 2021

  The fact that the IMF thinks your choice of operating system should impact your creditworthiness is something I've been warning people about for months because it shows why we need cosmopolitan software. Since it's nice to have the ability to pick up and move our apps elsewhere should we discover we're using the "wrong" one. Because political winds change, but good engineering endures. https://github.com/jart/cosmopolitan

• Show HN: Micro HTTP server in 22 lines of C
  5 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 31 Jul 2021

  I'm the author of the fastest open source HTTP server. Parsing HTTP 0.9, 1.0, and 1.1 is trivial. It's a walk in the park. It only takes about a hundred lines of code to create a proper O(n) parser. https://github.com/jart/cosmopolitan/blob/0b317523a0875d83d6...

  The Joyent HTTP parser is very good but it's implemented in a way that makes the problem much more complicated than it needs to be. The biggest obstacle with high-performance HTTP message parsing is the case-insensitive string comparison of header field names. Joyent'

• notcurses, next-generation tuis/character graphics, expands to macos and windows
  2 projects | reddit.com/r/C_Programming | 24 Jul 2021

  Consider Cosmopolitan Libc. It has zero dependencies. Here's a comparison between Cosmopolitan and Notcurses at printing videos in the terminal: https://twitter.com/JustineTunney/status/1412408110040354816/photo/1 The executables you create will also run on seven operating systems. https://github.com/jart/cosmopolitan

• Zip – How not to design a file format
  3 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 23 Jul 2021

  You can also read the redbean source code, since it's the web server that reads/writes to its own executable zip file as a native process. https://github.com/jart/cosmopolitan/blob/f3e28aa192d433c379... Some ZIP APIs are designed in such a way that you can even use the POPCNT instruction to decode them.