I worked for a company that published a PalmOS app. Palmgear.com was a very important distribution channel, but so was our own website, I forget the exact ratios.
You could do "network shares" as in mount the filesystem from Linux and export over Samba/NFS/etc; it would probably also be possible to export the drive as an iSCSI device and mount HFS(+) filesystems directly from the Mac.
What I've learned from visiting my own parents is, you can alleviate the energy concern, if you (1) get solar panels and (2) ban your spouse from running the dishwasher at night :P
Sounds like this is about making .OBJs that fit in the conventions set by Win32 and the Microsoft linker. If you were using Microsoft's LINK.EXE I'd look at https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/cpp/build/reference/nodefa... (and /Zi for the Microsoft compiler)
More generally, a lot of compiler generated code (including from LLVM IR -> native) will rely on compiler-specific runtime library functions, which aren't necessarily considered part of the "C runtime". https://wiki.osdev.org/Libgcc occupies this role for GCC-compiled code. See https://godbolt.org/z/fb75PPobz for an example (64-bit division on 32-bit x86 generates a call to ___divdi3)
I think Linux is the better choice for replacing the entire userland. From what I've seen, the BSDs don't have such an accessible userspace/kernelspace split. With some effort, on Linux you could probably just run an exe as your init.
I'm on a media engineering team and agree that applying the tech to a new use case often involves people with deep expertise spending a lot of time in the code.
I'd guess there are fewer media/codec engineers around today than there were web developers in 2006. In 2006, Gmail existed, but today's client- and server-side frameworks did not. It was a major bespoke lift to do many things which are "hello world" demos with a modern framework in 2025.
It'd be nice to have more flexible, orthogonal and adaptable interfaces to a lot of this tech, but I don't think the demand for it reaches critical mass.
> It was a major bespoke lift to do many things which are "hello world" demos with a modern framework in 2025.
This brings back a lot of memories -- I remember teaching myself how to use plain XMLHTTPRequest and PHP/MySQL to implement "AJAX" chat. Boy was that ugly JavaScript code. But on the other hand, it was so fast and cool and I could hardly believe that I had written that.
I started doing media/codec work around 2007 and finding experienced media engineers at the time was difficult and had been for quite some time. It's always been hard - super specialized knowledge that you can only really pick up working at a company that does it often enough to invest in folks learning it. In my case we were at a company that did desktop video editing software so it made sense, but that's obviously uncommon.
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