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NixOS and Portable Executables
I’ve been very impressed by the Cosmopolitan Libc project and the αcτµαlly pδrταblε εxεcµταblε file format that makes it all possible. Building a crazy polyglot binary that works on two architectures and half-a-dozen operating systems is one thing, but Mozilla’s Llamafile project showed that APEs were more than just a cool hack: it’s stunning that I just download a reasonably smart LLM to my computer, chmod +x it, and begin a conversation.
Building a crazy polyglot binary that works on two architectures and half-a-dozen operating systems is one thing, but Mozilla’s Llamafile project showed that APEs were more than just a cool hack: it’s stunning that I just download a reasonably smart LLM to my computer, chmod +x it, and begin a conversation. I hope to take it further at some point in the future: I’d like to build the loader itself from a known bootstrap path rather than fetching a binary, and I’d especially love to be able to do the same with Cosmopolitan Libc and cosmocc. I currently get so much useful stuff out of nix develop — all my build dependencies, pre-commit hooks, useful CI targets, and more — and I have projects in mind where I want Cosmopolitan Libc to be a “tier 1” platform.
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