Comment by yw3410
5 years ago
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.