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by univrsaltrans 23 days ago
Interesting project!

It's just a matter of time before we'll have a universal executable/binary translator that can run any program from any OS. These are artificial constructs when you think about it.

2 comments

> It's just a matter of time before we'll have a universal executable/binary translator that can run any program from any OS

People have been working on these layers for a long time. It's understood that programs are almost always fundamentally portable and only unable to run due to peculiarities. Smoothing over those differences in format, whether they be at the machine code layer, API layer, whatever, is doable but difficult. Props to qemu, Wine, DXVK, etc.

If you haven’t seen it, @jart’s Actually Portable Executable does just this - it’s definitely got a long ways to go (iirc it only supports CLI apps), but it’s fascinating to see a method of building binaries that can execute across various architectures and operating systems.