Decent article, why the need for someone to pick up the pitchfork and emphasize their moral compass publicly like this? The comment and ensuing discussion is so pointless.

Hence the Cosmopolitan Libc layer that's kinda essential to the APEs described in the article. That's where all the magic is to make the same code work on a variety of operating systems.

There's even a handy table to express syscall compatibility across all of Cosmopolitan's targets - https://justine.lol/cosmopolitan/functions.html

You could always just write your own OS that only cares about running your app. Of course you are always going to run into problems if your program uses functions that you didn't design around. I think any Linux user could tell you that Windows programs don't run on Linux, so I don't know how you could have thought that there was some sort of portability guarantee between these two operating systems or even subsets of them.

If this is some OOP propaganda then I'm sorry but you got duped and the c++/qt community should act more professionally.

portability in a language is sort of like the right to persue happiness vs a garantee to be happy.

A language can't direct the rest of the universe to ensure that something always works regardless of the environment or context.

But it can avoid adding it's own limitations and be agnostic itself. So c is very portable, even though c on machine A has acces to machine A features and not machine B features.

Libraries and frameworks and standards just help a little for a few common cases but they are just travel power plug adapters, not pprtability.

Of course, all these "portable C" stuff only works as long as it is pure C standard library.

One might extend the goals a bit, and include POSIX, and even then, only works if the set of target systems support POSIX, and finally if the implementation defined semantics happen to agree, and not cause random surprises.

Your general point stands, of course. One can only code against a tiny subset of features. Windows has now finally gotten "real" named pipes, though. (Since Windows 8 or whenever, can't remember exactly when.)

Yes, and yes:) It is exactly as amazing as it sounds. I'm still blown away that that includes both x86 and ARM.

As I understand, you have to compile your code for every machine you support, then it combines them into a single executable.

As long as you don't use nothing else besides C standard library.