blinkenlights is amazing! The entire time I was learning programming I thought to myself "hmm I wish I could see what the memory and registers actually look like at any given step" and bam, blinkenlights. Its an amazing piece of work.

How does one get a job like this? Just writing absolutely wild and weird projects?

I do weird/fun stuff on my own time but I get paid to do mostly boring stuff.

Run anywhere?

Nice try, I'm on nVidia Jetson and everything depends on a fixed version of libc, so if I want to use nVidia's gpu libraries, I better use their version of libc.

> I also can't envision a common scenario in which I would have a machine that doesn't have a c compiler but I would be able to run an APE executable

99.99% of people who want to run executables on mac or windows don't have a C or C++ compiler installed and wouldn't have the knowledge to operate it if they did. And if you want to install the default one for these platforms (MSVC or XCode) it's at least 30 minutes of download + 30 minutes of installation. For me this really solves an actual problem I've had customers & team members ask me hundreds of time - "how can I compile a Qt app for Mac when I'm on Windows" (and the inverse)

Ah, I was wondering how they did the window system integration.

At some point it's going to be easier to ship a fat binary of a compiler or bytecode interpreter along with a single representation of your application.

And then the cycle begins anew.

APE binaries usually come with an option to "assimilate": once downloaded, you can choose to only keep the stuff relevant to the platform you're currently using. Best of both worlds.

I expect that's a statically linked executable which includes all dependencies for ARM and x86. If you add up the size of dynamic link libraries of a regular Qt Creator installation on macOS you get about 400 MBytes (those are universal binaries which contain both ARM and x86 code).

What is the reference size? It is hard to compare.

For many applications the size of "assets" like images, localization data and other stuff will vastly outweight the code.

Harsh reviewer IMO

> WASM could solve all this, but that would mean all OSes would need WASM runtimes that supported a consistent set of standards and APIs. Have fun getting that to happen.

I mean if that's your solution to the problem, then Java already solved it.

The web platform is the best set of standards and APIs we have.

That’s why I use everything that I possibly can from qt libraries even if there are open source libraries that might be easier to use or more performant than qt versions.

It's insanely cool and not dangerous at all. Why would it be dangerous?

But I'm sure the platform owners, notably Apple and Microsoft, will find ways to prevent the widespread use of such technology. You have to buy certificates, notarize, sign, get reviewed, etc., so they can make extra money off developers and keep total control of their users in the name of some fake security theater. That's why everybody is writing web apps instead.

Seems pretty damn useful to me. You can throw a bunch of programs on a flash drive and use them on any computer you happen to be in front of.

It has no downside for the user, but simplifies automated builds and tests dramatically, because you don't need a 'build matrix'.

Ease of distribution is what made Electron so dominant (in addition to being familiar to web devs), leading application providers literally bundling an entire web browser just to display a single website.

Here's your use-case: providing a saner alternative to Electron. The Qt solution is more performant than the current solution.

It literally says in the first sentence that deployment on many platforms can be challenging. Checking the platform is trivial, presumably, and a necessary part of what is being done here.

I agree that this might be a dangerous thing to use, but it's not unprecedented. This has a lot in common with using cross-compiling process. If performance is good, it could potentially replace something like AppImage I guess. However, making all your dependencies compile with this thing and then debugging the result may end up being harder than maintaining however many separate builds. It sounds amazing to me that they got Qt to work with this tool. I don't see myself using this but I might take a closer look one day for the hell of it.

how many milliseconds do you think wasting at the start is too much?

ebassi moment

I'm also curious about the actual usecases. This seems very highly niche.

This can also lead to security issues, as it encourages the use of shared folders or USB drives for carrying around executables. You should never reuse executables from other systems - always download one from the first party.

And the file served is of pdf file. The font used is Titillium Web. The color of my bike shed is that of brown wood color.

Did I also contribute to the discussion of the tool?

All the honey badger (mascot of cosmopolitan libc) images were generated using FLUX.1-schnell on my MacBook Pro M1 Max.

I've blogged about all the AI usage at https://www.qt.io/blog/examples-of-local-llm-usage

The description on cosmopolitans webpage states:

> Cosmopolitan Libc makes C a build-anywhere run-anywhere language, like Java, except it doesn't need an interpreter or virtual machine.

WebAssembly would not achieve the same thing as it's in the same category as Java bytecode where you need some interpreter/VM/JIT/compiler to actually run it.

When i googled, it was very difficult to find anything in its original context, just some quotes, that certainly sound nutty on their face but also are very short to the point it is unclear if she was quoted fairly.