Comment by Rochus
10 hours ago
So what we need is essentially a "libc virtualization".
But Musl is only available on Linux, isn't it? Cosmopolitan (https://github.com/jart/cosmopolitan) goes further and is available also on Mac and Windows, and it uses e.g. SIMD and other performance related improvements. Unfortunately, one has to cut through the marketing "magic" to find the main engineering value; stripping away the "polyglot" shell-script hacks and the "Actually Portable Executable" container (which are undoubtedly innovative), the core benefit proposition of Cosmopolitan is indeed a platform-agnostic, statically-linked C standard (plus some Posix) library that performs runtime system call translation, so to say "the Musl we have been waiting for".
I find it amazing how much the mess that building C/C++ code has been for so many decades seems to have influenced the direction technology, the economy and even politics has been going.
Really, what would the world look like if this problem had been properly solved? Would the centralization and monetization of the Internet have followed the same path? Would Windows be so dominant? Would social media have evolved to the current status? Would we have had a chance to fight against the technofeudalism we're headed for?
What I find amazing is why people continously claim glibc is the problem here. I have a commercial software binary from 1996 that _still works_ to this day. It even links with X11, and works under Xwayland.
The trick? It's not statically linked, but dynamically linked. And it doesn't like with anything other than glibc, X11 ... and bdb.
At this point I think people just do not know how binary compatibility works at all. Or they refer to a different problem that I am not familiar with.
We (small HPC system) just upgraded our OS from RHEL 7 to RHEL 9. Most user apps are dynamically linked, too.
You don't want to believe how many old binaries broke. Lot of ABI upgrades like libpng, ncurses, heck even stuff like readline and libtiff all changed just enough for linker errors to occur.
Ironically all the statically compiled stuff was fine. Some small things like you mention only linking to glibc and X11 was fine too. Funnily enough grabbing some old .so files from the RHEL 7 install and dumping them into LD_LIBRARY_PATH also worked better than expected.
But yeah, now that I'm writing this out, glibc was never the problem in terms of forwards compatibility. Now running stuff compiled on modern Ubuntu or RHEL 10 on the older OS, now that's a whole different story...
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The problem of modern libc (newer than ~2004, I have no idea what that 1996 one is doing) isn't that old software stops working. It's that you can't compile software on your up to date desktop and have it run on your "security updates only" server. Or your clients "couple of years out of date" computers.
And that doesn't require using newer functionality.
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How does this technical issue affect the economy and politics? In what way would the world be different just because we used a better linker?
Well, you could just look at things from an interoperability and standards viewpoint.
Lots of tech companies and organizations have created artificial barriers to entry.
For example, most people own a computer (their phone) that they cannot control. It will play media under the control of other organizations.
The whole top-to-bottom infrastructure of DRM was put into place by hollywood, and then is used by every other program to control/restrict what people do.
existential crisis: so hot right now
If the APE concept isn't appealing to you, you may be interested in the work on LLVM libC. My friend recently delivered an under-appreciated lecture on the vision:
https://youtu.be/HtCMCL13Grg
tl;dw Google recognizes the need for a statically-linked modular latency sensitive portable POSIX runtime, and they are building it.
At the rate things are going we'll need a container virtualization layer as well, a docker for docker if you know what I mean
I'm building in this space, I take a docker inside a microvm (vm-lite) approach.
https://github.com/smol-machines/smolvm
And the cycle continues
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Do you mean something like gVisor?
"All problems in computer science can be solved by another level of indirection"
"... except for the problem of too many levels of indirection."
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ad infinitum ;-)
I desperately want to write C/C++ code that has a web server and can talk websockets, and that I can compile with Cosmopolitan.
I don't want Lua. Using Lua is crazy clever, but it's not what I want.
I should just vibe code the dang thing.