I came across this mind blowing piece of software engineering today: https://justine.lol/ape.html I found this quote to be particularly interesting:

One of the reasons why I love working with a lot of these old unsexy technologies, is that I want any software work I'm involved in to stand the test of time with minimal toil. Similar to how the Super Mario Bros ROM has managed to survive all these years without needing a GitHub issue tracker.

I believe the best chance we have of doing that, is by gluing together the binary interfaces that've already achieved a decades-long consensus, and ignoring the APIs.

(emphasis mine) I can't help but see some overlap with some of the work that @Kartik Agaram has done (especially his work on removing reliance on an Operating System).

This is really very cool! On top of all the normal OSs:

Your program will also boot on bare metal too. In other words, you've written a normal textbook C program, and thanks to Cosmopolitan's low-level linker magic, you've effectively created your own operating system which happens to run on all the existing ones as well.

(emphasis mine)

The above didn't pull me in, but this description did – wat 🤯 https://twitter.com/EmilStenstrom/status/1365764274103193600

A single-file application that runs on any platform, is its own OS AND has all of its data readable as a zip-file... so impressive!

Redbean is getting all the Hacker News attention, but Justine Tunney's underlying philosophy and engineering is just as impressive and interesting! Particularly for this community imo. Honestly, Justine is just an amazing engineer. If you look at any of her other projects, they are all equally impressive 🙂 . It seems like her goal is to make APE a viable alternative platform in the way that MUSL has become a mature viable alternative GLIBC. It's not the sexiest vision for the future of code, but I think it is still an important one.

Yes, I really like the philosophy behind this and think that this kind of stuff is really in the spirit of Future of Coding. It is a hack of the present that breaks walls (multiple OS binaries) and permits new use cases (single file deployment). Incremental future, but future anyway!