[sbstp]

I feel like there's a lot of potential between Go and Cosmopolitan libc. Go itself does not use libc much, as shown in the blog, but some great libraries like SQLite3 need it (unless you use https://pkg.go.dev/modernc.org/sqlite).

The ability to build a single static binary that works on Linux, Mac and Windows using Go would be life changing for the internal tools I develop at work.

[latchkey]

> The ability to build a single static binary that works on Linux, Mac and Windows using Go would be life changing for the internal tools I develop at work.

Just curious, life changing in what way? Obviously, 1 is better than 3, but I'm wondering if there is some other interesting reason.

[spease]

Hmmm…what about compiling to wasm, and/or then converting the wasm to C?

https://github.com/wasm3/wasm3/releases/tag/v0.4.8

https://github.com/WebAssembly/wabt/tree/main/wasm2c

[daenney]

Has been done and works pretty great: https://github.com/ncruces/go-sqlite3.

Though doesn’t convert the WASM to C, it runs the WASM in Wazero instead.

[spease]

How does that solve what the person I replied to was asking for?

[ncruces]

If I understood you, it doesn't help much, no, but neither does what you suggested.

You're suggesting compiling Go to Wasm (presumably using the wasip1 target?), then converting that to C using wabt, then using Cosmopolitan to create an APE… is that it?

Well, that's not going to work.

First of all, Go's wasip1 target doesn't even support cgo, so if you want SQLite, you're dead right there.

Then, even if you used say TinyGo (which might support cgo, not sure), WASI just isn't a great target to compile SQLite into. WASI is a pretty limited syscall layer. You'd end up with no file locking, no shared memory. Also no threads.

Then, on top of that, you'd layer Cosmopolitan issues. Having written a portable SQLite VFS from scratch, I am not impressed with how they just paper over file locking semantics incompatibilities between OSes, and then confidently ship a forking webserver with SQLite bundled in. It takes a certain temerity, and not running many SQLite torture tests.

Wasm as an intermediate target is great for (single threaded) CPU stuff. WASI is great if you can fit it, but otherwise, it's not, not really.

[fsmv]

The same exact binary working isn't going to happen without runtime performance penalties because the syscall numbers are different on different platforms. Also I believe on windows it's not possible to avoid linking some system libraries to use windows.h stuff, there is no stable ABI.

[pjmlp]

Linux is the exception among modern OSes to have a stable syscall ABI, everyone else offers only the proper OS API as entry point into OS services.

Once upon at time, static linking was the only thing OSes were capable of, all of them moved away from that, and there is no turning back outside embedded bare metal deployments, just become some people are obsessed with static linking.

[actionfromafar]

Though msvcrt.dll has a stable subset of functions available on all Windows versions.

[oguz-ismail]

I recall reading about new Macs with ARM chips not supporting static binaries. Is it not true?

[zamadatix]

That's been Apple's stance on full static linking MacOS in general, many years prior to the move to ARM e.g. https://developer.apple.com/library/archive/qa/qa1118/_index...

You're welcome to ignore it of course, it's just unofficial and a large pain.

[oguz-ismail]

>You're welcome to ignore it of course

How do you mean? Like, is it possible to run such binaries on M1? If so I'd really like to know how

[telotortium]

You can always disassemble libc and look for the system call numbers used by the syscall assembly instructions. It’s just that these numbers (and associated arguments and return values) are not stable and can and do change upon kernel updates (in which case libc will be updated to keep the libc interface stable). I believe Linux is the only major OS these days to guarantee binary compatibility of the syscall interface.

[oguz-ismail]

I know this works on Macs with Intel chips. But the ones with ARM chips just won't execute fully static binaries, and I'm wondering if there's a workaround.

[telotortium]

I’m guessing not. According to man ld on macOS, the -static flag, to produce a fully static executable, is only used to build the kernel. I don’t believe fully-static executables were ever officially supported on macOS, although they would work.

[zamadatix]

For clarity it's not the chip/ARM that causes the limitation, you can recompile the kernel (it's open source) to remove the block and it'll work fine - it's just a ton of work.

Alternatively, Linux :).

[jcelerier]

It only works if you don't ever upgrade macOS. Even a patch update sometimes can break it.

[saagarjha]

Nope.

[cyberax]

All Macs don't support static binaries. That's because the syscall interface on macOS is not stable, only libc is guaranteed to be stable.