cosmopolitan definition ¶

Definition by Justine Tunney ¶

See also

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.

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Definition ¶

Cosmopolitan makes C a build-once run-anywhere language, similar to Java, except it doesn’t require interpreters or virtual machines be installed beforehand.

Cosmo provides the same portability benefits as high-level languages like Go and Rust, but it doesn’t invent a new language and you won’t need to configure a CI system to build separate binaries for each operating system