Comment by alisonatwork
5 years ago
Agreed, this is the best programming-related thing I've seen on the internet in a long time. It reminds me of when I was a teenager, excited to become a computer programmer. Then I grew up and joined the real world workforce and it was all far less exciting than I imagined.
The coolest thing about this Actually Portable Executable is that once there's a compiler and linker built with it, I can play around with writing C on Windows without having to faff about with WSL or MinGW or learning what makes MSVC different from the C I learned in university and coded in my first job before I became a Java/JavaScript/Python/etc programmer. When I discovered Go I thought I had discovered the better C that just worked everywhere, but the idea of having plain old C that also just works everywhere is very appealing.
I like Go for the same reason, but I have an irrational fear that someday I might be in a life or death situation and should program my way out using a bare bones computer without Internet; So I keep tabs on C occasionally.
αcτµαlly pδrταblε εxεcµταblε has now piqued my interest, So I might actually indulge in C programming for fun again after all. Thanks Justine.
I think it's really cool project; but could you explain why it's important that a binary works everywhere for you? I don't really get the enthusiasm for this sort of thing.
Maybe I have a blind spot or something or I've just been in Unix-land for too long.
I think the UNIX thing is the blind spot. People who run Linux or BSD don't seem so bothered to recompile for their own platform, safe in the knowledge that it will almost certainly just work.
But on Windows, trying to get open source software written in C to compile has been a pain for decades. There have been some attempts to make it work (notably Cygwin, and now MSYS2), but it can still be challenging, especially with programs that were never designed to be compiled for non-UNIX (or non-Linux!) targets.
Having a C library that is designed from the ground up to target multiple operating systems, and an executable format that means the first compile is the only compile, that takes away a lot of toil that programmers normally have when trying to build their own abstractions around each platform's C library. I guess from UNIX land you could see the benefit as removing the need for autoconf or platform ifdefs.