Essentially it comes with a garbage collector which gets embedded into your binary as well as any other standard library calls you may need for fundamental features.
& from what I gather, APE is tightly-bound to x86_64, & depends on an embedded emulator for other architectures:
> All we have to do embed an ARM build of the emulator above within our x86 executables, and have them morph and re-exec appropriately, similar to how Cosmopolitan is already doing doing with qemu-x86_64, except that this wouldn't need to be installed beforehand. The tradeoff is that, if we do this, binaries will only be 10x smaller than Go's Hello World, instead of 100x smaller.
could still be useful as an optional build target though... (i.e. GOOS=cosmopolitan)
This thing of yours is quite an accomplishment. Even so, I hope it goes no further. If it does (& it probably will, because it is convenient), most of the computing world will have stacked yet another sub-optimal low-level mono-culture on top of the one that was already there.
From the robustness/survivability perspective, the mono-cultures we have are bad enough.
In the world where a windows binary is not expected to run on a mac, and vice versa, they still have the option to change things on an as-needed basis (like the golang breakage on osx). In a world filled with APEs, you will have canonized all of the present OS idiosyncrasies that made APE possible in the first place, & we will be stuck with them forever.
Nah eventually every operating system is just going to support x86_64-linux-gnu and there won't be a need for APE in our glorious future. In that case, Cosmopolitan will just be a non-GPL libc that goes as fast as Glibc. But until all operating systems become fully developed, we have an outstanding hack to hold us over.
> eventually every operating system is just going to support x86_64-linux-gnu
Whether it's batteries included, or batteries sold separately, we'll still be stuck with batteries. If I want to run Linux on my Mac, that's what UTM is for.
Despite my reservations, nothing but respect, & enjoyed your Feross presentation.
