Use Actually Portable Executable which enables you to compile textbook C programs as unikernels that boot on bare metal, as well as execute natively on all the existing operating systems too (without needing a runtime or interpreter). We've been working hard to democratize ring0 privileges since spectre has made the performance costs of having an operating system too high: https://github.com/jart/cosmopolitan/issues/20#issuecomment-...
Much of the point of suggesting Mirage was to get away from C - my position is that the correctness costs of C's undefined behaviour (as implemented by real-world C compilers), limited testing support, poor dependency management and so on are too high.
One of my goals with Cosmopolitan is to attract developers who build high-level languages. MirageOS depends on OCaml which depends on C. We need a sturdy foundation at the lowest levels that can enable these visions by helping high-level environments be successful. Cosmopolitan can be that foundation. For example, the codebase has 192 test programs. Much focus has been placed on using the Undefined Behavior Sanitizer and Address Sanitizer to vet everything. My past experience was working on projects like TensorFlow and I started security initiatives like Operation Rosehub which together helped us have the highest performance software infrastructure that's safer too.
By runtime I meant to say external runtimes. Your cosmo binaries are statically don't depend on anything except stable kernel interfaces, when you run on mac/nt/linux/bsd. That means it doesn't need to link any .so files like the glibc runtime. Therefore you won't be impacted by things like linux distro versioning and incompatibilities.
Does it have full support for all the kinds of stacks people are running on Linux today? Is there a robust ecosystem of MirageOS users online able to help troubleshoot issues from the simple to the arcane? Is it supported by VPS providers the world over?
Personally, while I doubt these are the case, having never heard of MirageOS before, I'm willing to be proven wrong. However, if the answer to any of these is "no", I have a hard time seeing how "just abandon Linux wholesale for NewShinyThing" is a viable option for more than a tiny subset of users. (Even if they're all "yes", it's still a wildly unrealistic expectation...)
> Does it have full support for all the kinds of stacks people are running on Linux today?
No, of course not; the only thing that supports everything that Linux supports is Linux. But most use cases don't use every part of Linux.
> Is there a robust ecosystem of MirageOS users online able to help troubleshoot issues from the simple to the arcane?
I doubt it, but how do we get to there from here except by more users starting to use it?
> Is it supported by VPS providers the world over?
Yes, since what you build is just a VM image.
> However, if the answer to any of these is "no", I have a hard time seeing how "just abandon Linux wholesale for NewShinyThing" is a viable option for more than a tiny subset of users. (Even if they're all "yes", it's still a wildly unrealistic expectation...)
I don't disagree as such, but I do think that at this point building anything on these insecure foundations is throwing good money after bad / building castles on sand. Probably 95% of the time you build something that serves your present business purposes, accept a certain amount of insecurity, and get on with your life. But it's worth putting a bit of effort into looking for better ways to do things.