Author here. The intention behind the post is actually very simple. I want to be able to write stdio socket programs that run at native speed, and share them with my friends online. I don't want to have conversations like here's how you install steel bank common lisp and compile tensorflow and remove the toolbar that oracle bundled in the installer. I'm also not concerned about running software on telephones since doing so requires obtaining authorization from Google and Apple beforehand.
Before I built Actually Portable Executable, PCs behaved de facto similar to mobile development restrictions, where for example if you want to build for Apple you download XCode, and if you want to build for Windows you have to download MSVC. But it thankfully has never been a hard requirement for creating first class native programs. It simply required the will to ignore official tooling and encode binaries the hard way that directly talk to canonical stock kernel abis, so that we don't need things like jenkins to compile release binaries n times for the same microprocessor architecture.
I had enough free time to do it. I've also shared a tool that makes it easier for everyone else to do it too. Enjoy!
> I'm also not concerned about running software on telephones since doing so requires obtaining authorization from Google
That's not actually true. Fortnite has an APK download many users download straight from the internet and run on their Android phones for example. There's no requirement to run Google authorized software as long as you are willing to check a checkbox in the phone settings.
I hope I didn't come off as too negative, I think it's a really cool hack.
I guess the people I could see myself sharing binaries with are either too clueless to use the command line or savvy enough that installing a compiler/interpreter is not an issue.
What's the deal with the uncommon font of the post title? I saw it here on HN too and was wondering if it's just aestetics, of if there's something else.
It is using (abusing?) Greek letters. I actually kind of hate that as those letters don't necessarily sound anything like what they look like to English speakers. It is effectively gibberish.
Oh man, missing the fun! I used to overwrite my stock system font with the glyphs from a greek font just to practice learning Greek letters. They largely map!
Before I built Actually Portable Executable, PCs behaved de facto similar to mobile development restrictions, where for example if you want to build for Apple you download XCode, and if you want to build for Windows you have to download MSVC. But it thankfully has never been a hard requirement for creating first class native programs. It simply required the will to ignore official tooling and encode binaries the hard way that directly talk to canonical stock kernel abis, so that we don't need things like jenkins to compile release binaries n times for the same microprocessor architecture.
I had enough free time to do it. I've also shared a tool that makes it easier for everyone else to do it too. Enjoy!