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Justine Tunney 9e3e985ae5 Make terminal ui binaries work well everywhere 
Here's some screenshots of an emulator tui program that was compiled on
Linux, then scp'd it to Windows, Mac, and FreeBSD.

https://justine.storage.googleapis.com/blinkenlights-cmdexe.png
https://justine.storage.googleapis.com/blinkenlights-imac.png
https://justine.storage.googleapis.com/blinkenlights-freebsd.png
https://justine.storage.googleapis.com/blinkenlights-lisp.png

How is this even possible that we have a nontrivial ui binary that just
works on Mac, Windows, Linux, and BSD? Surely a first ever achievement.

Fixed many bugs. Bootstrapped John McCarthy's metacircular evaluator on
bare metal in half the size of Altair BASIC (about 2.5kb) and ran it in
emulator for fun and profit.
 		2020-10-19 06:38:31 -07:00
..
calls Make improvements 2020-09-14 00:02:34 -07:00
consts Make terminal ui binaries work well everywhere 2020-10-19 06:38:31 -07:00
errfuns Initial import 2020-06-15 07:18:57 -07:00
machcalls Initial import 2020-06-15 07:18:57 -07:00
stubs Polish up repository and other revisions 2020-06-16 06:38:43 -07:00
README.md Initial import 2020-06-15 07:18:57 -07:00
consensus.py Initial import 2020-06-15 07:18:57 -07:00
consts.sh Make terminal ui binaries work well everywhere 2020-10-19 06:38:31 -07:00
errfuns.h Initial import 2020-06-15 07:18:57 -07:00
errfuns.sh Initial import 2020-06-15 07:18:57 -07:00
g_syscount.S Polish up repository and other revisions 2020-06-16 06:38:43 -07:00
gen.sh Initial import 2020-06-15 07:18:57 -07:00
machcalls.sh Initial import 2020-06-15 07:18:57 -07:00
macros.h Polish up repository and other revisions 2020-06-16 06:38:43 -07:00
restorert.S Polish up repository and other revisions 2020-06-16 06:38:43 -07:00
syscall.S Add x86_64-linux-gnu emulator 2020-08-25 04:43:42 -07:00
syscalls.sh Make improvements 2020-09-14 00:02:34 -07:00
systemfive.S Make terminal ui binaries work well everywhere 2020-10-19 06:38:31 -07:00
sysv.mk Add x86_64-linux-gnu emulator 2020-08-25 04:43:42 -07:00
versions.txt Initial import 2020-06-15 07:18:57 -07:00

README.md

SYNOPSIS

System Five Import Libraries

OVERVIEW

Bell System Five is the umbrella term we use to describe Linux, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, and Mac OS X which all have nearly-identical application binary interfaces that stood the test of time, having definitions nearly the same as those of AT&T back in the 1980's.

Cosmopolitan aims to help you build apps that can endure over the course of decades, just like these systems have: without needing to lift a finger for maintenance churn, broken builds, broken hearts.

The challenge to System V binary compatibility basically boils down to numbers. All these systems agree on what services are provided, but tend to grant them wildly different numbers.

We address this by putting all the numbers in a couple big shell scripts, ask the GNU Assembler to encode them into binaries using an efficient LEB128 encoding, unpacked by _init(), and ref'd via extern const. It gives us good debuggability, and any costs are gained back by fewer branches in wrapper functions.z