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Comment by sgammon | Hacker News Reader

Build once against a universal libc layer, and produce universal binaries which run on a variety of different architectures and operating systems.

It’s like LLVM or JVM but even for C, and without the overhead of virtualization.

(Hope I did it justice I am merely a fan)

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Yes, but who builds binaries this way and what do they use them for?

Even though GitHub Actions did wonders for people to be able to build their software in multiple platforms, you still have to run one build per platform and distribute one file per platform. If you could run a single build instead (and be confident that Cosmo guarantees that if it works on one, it works on the others, which may be difficult of course) and distribute a single file, that would make things much simpler and more efficient. You could save a lot of electricity if you run builds on premise (not to mention it's good for the environment). I can't believe people don't see a value in this.

Malware.

Most binaries that I have seen in the wild use cosmo/ape binary format to have "free obfuscation" that is hard to analyze by antivirus and EDR software due to its mutating self-extracting pkzip-like behavior.

Well, and of course CLI tools. I guess it's the same selling points that fit golang as well - aside from cosmo's binary format having a universal header.

>hard to analyze by antivirus

Isn't it just a matter of updating the AV to be aware of this format? It's not like APE is the only "weird" binary format that exists, since there's stuff like UPX (which is indeed flagged by many AVs).

I absolutely would use this for workshops I give, where users bring a variety of oddball hardware and want to do things like run FPGA synthesis or run software that pokes USB packets to communicate with debug endpoints.

In the past I've made sure to build for each platform in CI and distribute USB drives, and this just makes it one notch easier by letting me ship the same binaries to everyone.

Honestly - CLI apps that need to run on multiple platforms. I once built a version of https://github.com/lovebrew/lovebrew (back when it was written in Nim) using Cosmopolitan 2, and I got back a single binary that ran on all major operating systems.

This greatly reduces the time GitHub actions would need to run, as you just build and release for one OS. As others have mentioned, this does not really work for native GUI apps, that isn't supported by Cosmopolitan as far as I know. But for small CLI tools it works great!

Python wheels are one use-case I’m excited about.

And nuitka.

I imagine portable apps might be nice. It would be cool to be able to create a flash drive with universal PGP toolkit. We're limited to console apps, though.

It would be amusing to use it to create X servers – after all, we have sockets.

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