[sbstp]

I feel like there's a lot of potential between Go and Cosmopolitan libc. Go itself does not use libc much, as shown in the blog, but some great libraries like SQLite3 need it (unless you use https://pkg.go.dev/modernc.org/sqlite).

The ability to build a single static binary that works on Linux, Mac and Windows using Go would be life changing for the internal tools I develop at work.

[latchkey]

> The ability to build a single static binary that works on Linux, Mac and Windows using Go would be life changing for the internal tools I develop at work.

Just curious, life changing in what way? Obviously, 1 is better than 3, but I'm wondering if there is some other interesting reason.

[spease]

Hmmm…what about compiling to wasm, and/or then converting the wasm to C?

https://github.com/wasm3/wasm3/releases/tag/v0.4.8

https://github.com/WebAssembly/wabt/tree/main/wasm2c

[daenney]

Has been done and works pretty great: https://github.com/ncruces/go-sqlite3.

Though doesn’t convert the WASM to C, it runs the WASM in Wazero instead.

[fsmv]

The same exact binary working isn't going to happen without runtime performance penalties because the syscall numbers are different on different platforms. Also I believe on windows it's not possible to avoid linking some system libraries to use windows.h stuff, there is no stable ABI.

[pjmlp]

Linux is the exception among modern OSes to have a stable syscall ABI, everyone else offers only the proper OS API as entry point into OS services.

Once upon at time, static linking was the only thing OSes were capable of, all of them moved away from that, and there is no turning back outside embedded bare metal deployments, just become some people are obsessed with static linking.

[actionfromafar]

Though msvcrt.dll has a stable subset of functions available on all Windows versions.

[oguz-ismail]

I recall reading about new Macs with ARM chips not supporting static binaries. Is it not true?

[zamadatix]

That's been Apple's stance on full static linking MacOS in general, many years prior to the move to ARM e.g. https://developer.apple.com/library/archive/qa/qa1118/_index...

You're welcome to ignore it of course, it's just unofficial and a large pain.

[cyberax]

All Macs don't support static binaries. That's because the syscall interface on macOS is not stable, only libc is guaranteed to be stable.