from Hacker News

NixOS and Portable Executables

by jandeboevrie on 2/11/25, 5:50 AM with 21 comments

• by _jackdk_ on 2/11/25, 12:30 PM

  The post title has been mangled, perhaps by the title simplifier. The "actually" in the title is important - the post is about Justine Tunney's work on "actually portable executables" (https://justine.lol/ape.html). Without it, it sounds like it refers to standard Microsoft "Portable Executable" (PE) format binaries.

• by romesmoke on 2/11/25, 10:20 AM

  Were I to design a computer (both HW & SW), the founding principle should be compatibility with legacy code at no expense of performance or user effort.

  Stuff like this gives me hope that I'm not merely wet-dreaming.

• by yjftsjthsd-h on 2/11/25, 2:28 PM

  > But APEs have been a little finicky for me. I run NixOS as my primary operating system, and sometimes an APE will refuse to launch, or I’ll need to pass --assimilate to it and permanently turn it into an x86-64 Linux binary before it’ll work.

  I wonder if anyone could expand on "sometimes"? Because I've got a llamafile on nixos that seems to work fine. I'd assumed that meant that APE+NixOS worked, but it sounds like it only works part of the time?

• by sandreas on 2/11/25, 9:20 AM

  The main reason I ditched NixOS was the missing ability to run dynamically linked executables by default and not wanting to deal with the possible fixes.

  Good to See that there is hope for that.

• by revskill on 2/11/25, 10:08 AM

  The font size and color and layout seems uneasy for me.