> However portability isn't the only selling point. Cosmo Libc will make your software faster and use less memory too.
With that in mind, is there a "slim binary" mode that lets me only export the code to run the binaries on my system, so that I can reap these benefits for personal use without added "bloat" for a feature that I won't need? (where "bloat" is contextual, with the current context being "not actually planning to make use of portability")
Author here. We've got you covered. Search for `MODE=tinylinux` in the https://github.com/jart/cosmopolitan#getting-started section of the README. If you use that build mode, then hello world for x86 linux is only 8kb in size. It's very similar to what you'd expect from Musl Libc. All the Windows / BSD / Mac / BIOS stuff gets removed from the compilation.
That predefined mode is actually a friendly wrapper around a more generalized platform support system Cosmopolitan offers, which is called `-DSUPPORT_VECTOR` where you can define a bitset of specifically what platforms you want to be supported. Then dead code elimination takes care of the rest. The same concept also generally applies to microarchitecture support, where you can have as much or as little runtime dispatching as you want.
Would you consider this a competitive replacement of Busybox? Curious if you've compared, since they also take liberty in cutting out uncommon functionality.
I think you can subset supported systems, like you could only compile for x86_64 ELF systems (aka Linux and *BSD) and have the shim be much smaller; presumably a subset of one is also acceptable. I don’t know how (or if) you can do this with the new build environment, though.
With that in mind, is there a "slim binary" mode that lets me only export the code to run the binaries on my system, so that I can reap these benefits for personal use without added "bloat" for a feature that I won't need? (where "bloat" is contextual, with the current context being "not actually planning to make use of portability")