I agree with some of the other comments here, that while this is a very impressive hack (and this is Hacker News!) the real world value seems dubious.
It looks like a very clever way of packaging an x86 fat binary for multiple platforms, without actually duplicating the code. To support ARM I assume it’ll need to be an actual fat binary, with both x86 and ARM code. At that point, unless I actually test the code myself on both architectures, how can I be confident it’s going to work properly?
If you’re using very simple C constructs and not doing anything fancy, it should work, but it’s not clear to me that this approach is preferable to e.g. a Python script. If you’re doing fancy stuff, it’s a bit more chancy as C isn’t memory-safe and has tons of undefined behavior and platform-specified weirdness.
Java is “run anywhere” because they’ve specified the JVM in massive detail and tried to ensure it actually works the same on all platforms. I don’t see how you can have that same confidence if you’re running machine code everywhere.
I guess I just don’t see the use case where this is compelling. If I write a handy Unix utility in C, I’ll just keep the source code around, and compile it as needed.
It might be handy if you need to move such a utility quickly from Unix to Windows, if you don’t have any dev tools set up. But I can’t think of a situation when I’ve needed that.
It looks like a very clever way of packaging an x86 fat binary for multiple platforms, without actually duplicating the code. To support ARM I assume it’ll need to be an actual fat binary, with both x86 and ARM code. At that point, unless I actually test the code myself on both architectures, how can I be confident it’s going to work properly?
If you’re using very simple C constructs and not doing anything fancy, it should work, but it’s not clear to me that this approach is preferable to e.g. a Python script. If you’re doing fancy stuff, it’s a bit more chancy as C isn’t memory-safe and has tons of undefined behavior and platform-specified weirdness.
Java is “run anywhere” because they’ve specified the JVM in massive detail and tried to ensure it actually works the same on all platforms. I don’t see how you can have that same confidence if you’re running machine code everywhere.
I guess I just don’t see the use case where this is compelling. If I write a handy Unix utility in C, I’ll just keep the source code around, and compile it as needed.
It might be handy if you need to move such a utility quickly from Unix to Windows, if you don’t have any dev tools set up. But I can’t think of a situation when I’ve needed that.