Welcome Cosmopolitan Cosmonauts

[Justine Tunney]

You're receiving this email because you subscribed to cosmopolitan-libc@ after last week's story on Hacker News about our build-once run-anywhere c library.We got more than ten thousand visits to the website, 600 upvotes, 200 clones, and 42 subscribers to this list. Not bad for one week!

I'll first introduce myself as Justine. I'm the author/curator of the cosmo codebase. I spent the last two years working on this project, for fun, after leaving Google Brain. One of the difficulties I noticed the research community encounters with open source, is that (a) you're lucky if you get your program working on more than one distro, and (b) any code you publish will approach read-only on a long enough timeline (due to things like distro dependency churn). Normally folks solve this by putting everything in a Docker container.

I felt like we deserved a better solution. So I came up with the actually portable executable file format and wrote a more permissively licensed C library within a hermetically defined build environment without dependencies that supports it. Since then, I've dogfooded the work by writing the demo programs found on my website. It was effortless to get them all running on all the major platforms. They're all distributed as single-file executables which are statically linked and have no dependencies other than themselves. I believe each of these programs will continue working without maintenance for a considerable amount of time. Thus, once I was sure it worked and that Cosmopolitan was just as fun for me to use, as it was to create, I brought it to the attention of the world so you too can enjoy the same benefits. Thanks for subscribing!

But enough about me. I want this thread to be an opportunity to introduce yourself too. Tell us about your interest in Cosmopolitan and what sorts of problems you're hoping it can solve. If you're already using the library, then tell us about how it's helped so far. You may also want to share any wishlist items for ways you'd like to see it improved.

[Pablo Mayrgundter]

Hi!  I'm Pablo and used to work with Justine and have been following the work on Cosmo with great curiosity!

Very aspirationally, I'd like to use it to help provide the minimal host support for a JS/WebGL stack to turn old devices into little VR/AR portals.