Author here. Thanks! I was deeply inspired when I read the source code to early versions of Linux and UNIX. The dream of that simple elegant power is something I'm hoping to restore for a new generation. All I'm doing to achieve that is simply standing on the shoulders of the giants who came before me.
Can you blog a bit of the career/cognitive/skill evolutionary history behind this? Did the cosmo stuff come out of this or something else?
Learned this in X level school, found out about Y, read about Y, learned this, got this job doing this, learned this from Z, got experience of AA... etc.
Of course, assuming this exists, and you exist. And blogs "exist".
Author here. When I first discovered the idea for Actually Portable Executable I thought I was going mad like Terry Davis. I couldn't even believe that it was possible until I actually did it. It cost me my job but I couldn't be happier with the result. This project is going to make problems disappear for so many developers. It's the sort of tool people can get excited about. I'm so happy that my prior career success and top-notch training have granted me the privilege of bringing something this cool to the world. Enjoy!
In all seriousness: whether it's exciting or not, this is something that should be getting federal funding. It really shouldn't be difficult for large, government-backed organizations to justify their interest. I don't have a lead for you (otherwise, I'd have invoked it by now to work on my own project[1], which has something in common through the use of polyglot files to achieve a similar effect[2], while mostly otherwise taking a different approach), but since you have a high profile, casting a wide net to attract the attention of someone able to secure the funding is something to consider.
Have you considered trying to make system calls inline to avoid the call overhead? Or already thought about it?
I've been banging my head against the wall of trying to make a micro KVM guest and the glibc startup code uses inline SYSCALL everywhere, I assume to make things faster. It does seem to call CPUID a lot too, but I guess it's not as expensive as having to make full-blown system calls.
Cosmopolitan defines linkable symbols for all the __NR_syscall constants so you can absolutely use inlining if you like to live dangerously. For example: https://github.com/jart/cosmopolitan/blob/91f4167a45f811fde6... There really isn't any performance advantage to doing this, because the SYSCALL instruction itself has something like a 2000+ cycle cost due to all the copying that needs to happen on the kernel side along with things like spectre mitigations which have made is slower. So the 8 cycle cost of having a normal read() function wrapper is the wrong thing to be focusing on. Cosmopolitan aims to address the performance cost of SYSCALL by making it possible to run your binary on bare metal, where your program becomes a kernel, and therefore needn't pay any context switching costs at all.
