[Info-vax] redbean and the Actually Portable Executable

[Stephen Hoffman]

On 2022-06-20 13:21:42 +0000, plugh said:

> "Compile and run on any x86 OS"...

Very clever proof-of-concept work, though probably not going to be all 
that workable for production apps given the shifting foundations, and 
with increasing requirements for app security.

As alternatives go, WebAssembly is a shade less hackish, for the folks 
that do need cross-platform portability: https://webassembly.org

Apps can be built to JavaScript, too. As has been posted around here 
before: https://emscripten.org and https://bellard.org/jslinux/ and 
such.

And apps running directly on JRE are yet another portable alternative, 
and those apps are rather more supportable.

OpenVMS does have an older JRE available (based on OpenJDK 8), though 
no Wasm support and/or emscripten support and/or Wasmer 
https://wasmer.io support.

Somebody would also have to port that proof-of-concept to OpenVMS 
(which does use ELF) if they really needed that approach.

Given the native compilers aren't yet available for OpenVMS x86-64, 
this is all seemingly a little premature.

But then... I just can't wait to find the first example of that 
proof-of-concept in production with some critical lost-source-code app 
binary built for not-sure-which-OS-but-ancient. Because that's gonna 
happen to some IT staff sooner or later.


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