cosmopolitan/README.md

Cosmopolitan

Cosmopolitan Libc makes C a build-once run-anywhere language, like Java, except it doesn't need an interpreter or virtual machine. Instead, it reconfigures stock GCC and Clang to output a POSIX-approved polyglot format that runs natively on Linux + Mac + Windows + FreeBSD + OpenBSD + NetBSD + BIOS with the best possible performance and the tiniest footprint imaginable.

Background

For an introduction to this project, please read the αcτµαlly pδrταblε εxεcµταblε blog post and cosmopolitan libc website. We also have API documentation.

Getting Started

It's recommended that Cosmopolitan be installed to /opt/cosmo and /opt/cosmos on your computer. The first has the monorepo. The second contains your non-monorepo artifacts.

sudo mkdir -p /opt
sudo chmod 1777 /opt
git clone https://github.com/jart/cosmopolitan /opt/cosmo
export PATH="/opt/cosmo/bin:/opt/cosmos/bin:$PATH"
echo 'PATH="/opt/cosmo/bin:/opt/cosmos/bin:$PATH"' >>~/.profile
ape-install        # optionally install a faster systemwide ape loader
cosmocc --update   # pull cosmo and rebuild toolchain

You've now successfully installed your very own cosmos. Now let's build an example program:

// hello.c
#include <stdio.h>

int main() {
  printf("hello world\n");
}

To compile the program, you can run the cosmocc command. It's important to give it an output path that ends with .com so the output format will be Actually Portable Executable. When this happens, a concomitant debug binary is created automatically too.

cosmocc -o hello.com hello.c
./hello.com
./hello.com.dbg

You can use the cosmocc toolchain to build conventional open source projects which use autotools. This strategy normally works:

export CC=cosmocc
export CXX=cosmoc++
./configure --prefix=/opt/cosmos
make -j
make install

The Cosmopolitan Libc runtime links some heavyweight troubleshooting features by default, which are very useful for developers and admins. Here's how you can log system calls:

./hello.com --strace

Here's how you can get a much more verbose log of function calls:

./hello.com --ftrace

If you don't want rich runtime features like the above included, and you just want libc, and you want smaller simpler programs. In that case, you can consider using MODE=tiny, which is preconfigured by the repo in build/config.mk. Using this mode is much more effective at reducing binary footprint than the -Os flag alone. You can change your build mode by doing the following:

export MODE=tiny
cosmocc --update

We can also make our program slightly smaller by using the system call interface directly, which is fine, since Cosmopolitan polyfills these interfaces across platforms, including Windows. For example:

// hello2.c
#include <unistd.h>
int main() {
  write(1, "hello world\n", 12);
}

Once compiled, your APE binary should be ~36kb in size.

export MODE=tiny
cosmocc -Os -o hello2.com hello2.c
./hello2.com

But let's say you only care about your binaries running on Linux and you don't want to use up all this additional space for platforms like WIN32. In that case, you can try MODE=tinylinux for example which will create executables more on the order of 8kb (similar to Musl Libc).

export MODE=tinylinux
cosmocc --update
cosmocc -Os -o hello2.com hello2.c
./hello2.com  # <-- actually an ELF executable

ARM

Cosmo supports cross-compiling binaries for machines with ARM microprocessors. For example:

make -j8 m=aarch64 o/aarch64/third_party/ggml/llama.com
make -j8 m=aarch64-tiny o/aarch64-tiny/third_party/ggml/llama.com

That'll produce ELF executables that run natively on two operating systems: Linux Arm64 (e.g. Raspberry Pi) and MacOS Arm64 (i.e. Apple Silicon), thus giving you full performance. The catch is you have to compile these executables on an x86_64-linux machine. The second catch is that MacOS needs a little bit of help understanding the ELF format. To solve that, we provide a tiny APE loader you can use on M1 machines.

scp ape/ape-m1.c macintosh:
scp o/aarch64/third_party/ggml/llama.com macintosh:
ssh macintosh
xcode-install
cc -o ape ape-m1.c
sudo cp ape /usr/local/bin/ape

You can run your ELF AARCH64 executable on Apple Silicon as follows:

ape ./llama.com

If you want to run the MODE=aarch64 unit tests, you need to have qemu-aarch64 installed as a binfmt_misc interpreter. It needs to be a static binary if you want it to work with Landlock Make's security. You can use the build included in our third_party/qemu/ folder.

doas cp o/third_party/qemu/qemu-aarch64 /usr/bin/qemu-aarch64
doas sh -c "echo ':qemu-aarch64:M::\x7fELF\x02\x01\x01\x00\x00\x00\x00\x00\x00\x00\x00\x00\x02\x00\xb7\x00:\xff\xff\xff\xff\xff\xff\xff\x00\xff\xff\xff\xff\xff\xff\xff\xff\xfe\xff\xff\xff:/usr/bin/qemu-aarch64:CF' > /proc/sys/fs/binfmt_misc/register"
make -j8 m=aarch64

Please note that the qemu-aarch64 binfmt_misc interpreter installation process is essential for being able to use the aarch64-unknown-cosmo toolchain to build fat APE binaries on your x86-64 machine.

AMD64 + ARM64 fat APE binaries

If you've setup the qemu binfmt_misc interpreter, then you can can use cosmo's toolchains to build fat ape binaries. It works by compiling your program twice, so you can have a native build for both architectures in the same file. The two programs are merged together by apelink.com which also embeds multiple copies of APE loader and multiple symbols tables.

The easiest way to build fat APE is using fatcosmocc. This compiler works by creating a concomitant .aarch64/foo.o for every foo.o you compile. The only exception is the C preprocessor mode, which actually runs x86-64 GCC except with macros like __x86_64__ undefined.

This toolchain works great for C projects that are written in a portable way and don't produce architecture-specific artifacts. One example of a large project that can be easily built is GNU coreutils.

cd coreutils
fatcosmocc --update ||exit
./configure CC=fatcosmocc \
            AR=fatcosmoar \
            INSTALL=$(command -v fatcosmoinstall) \
            --prefix=/opt/cosmos \
            --disable-nls \
            --disable-dependency-tracking \
            --disable-silent-rules
make -j8

You'll then have a bunch of files like src/ls which are fat ape binaries. If you want to run them on Windows, then you simply need to rename the file so that it has the .com suffix. Better yet, consider making that a symlink (a.k.a. reparse point). The biggest gotcha with fatcosmocc though is ensuring builds don't strip binaries. For example, Linux's install -s command actually understands Windows' Portable Executable format well enough to remove the MS-DOS stub, which is where the APE shell script is stored. You need to ensure that fatcosmoinstall is used instead. Especially if your project needs to install the libraries built by fatacosmoar into /opt/cosmos.

Advanced Fat APE Builds

Once you get seriously involved in creating fat APE builds of software you're going to eventually outgrow fatcosmocc. One example is Emacs which is trickier to build, because it produces architecture-specific files, and it also depends on shared files, e.g. zoneinfo. Since we like having everything in a neat little single-file executable container that doesn't need an "installation wizard", this tutorial will explain how we manage to accomplish that.

What you're going to do is, instead of using fatcosmocc, you're going to use both the x86_64-unknown-cosmo-cc and aarch64-unknown-cosmo-cc toolchains independently, and then run apelink and zip to manually build the final files. But there's a few tricks to learn first.

The first trick is to create a symlink on your system called /zip. Cosmopolitan Libc normally uses that as a synthetic folder that lets you access the assets in your zip executable. But since that's a read-only file system, your build system should use the normal one.

doas ln -sf /opt/cosmos /zip

Now create a file named rebuild-fat.sh which runs the build twice:

#!/bin/sh
set -ex
export MODE=aarch64
export COSMOS=/opt/cosmos/aarch64
rebuild-cosmos.sh aarch64
export MODE=
export COSMOS=/opt/cosmos/x86_64
rebuild-cosmos.sh x86_64
wall.com 'finished building'

Then create a second file rebuild-cosmos.sh which runs your build:

#!/bin/bash
set -ex

ARCH=${1:-x86_64}
export COSMO=${COSMO:-/opt/cosmo}
export COSMOS=${COSMOS:-/opt/cosmos/$ARCH}
export AS=$(command -v $ARCH-unknown-cosmo-as) || exit
export CC=$(command -v $ARCH-unknown-cosmo-cc) || exit
export CXX=$(command -v $ARCH-unknown-cosmo-c++) || exit
export AR=$(command -v $ARCH-unknown-cosmo-ar) || exit
export STRIP=$(command -v $ARCH-unknown-cosmo-strip) || exit
export INSTALL=$(command -v $ARCH-unknown-cosmo-install) || exit
export OBJCOPY=$(command -v $ARCH-unknown-cosmo-objcopy) || exit
export OBJDUMP=$(command -v $ARCH-unknown-cosmo-objdump) || exit
export ADDR2LINE=$(command -v $ARCH-unknown-cosmo-addr2line) || exit

$CC --update

export COSMOPOLITAN_DISABLE_ZIPOS=1

cd ~/vendor/zlib
./configure --prefix=$COSMOS --static
make clean
make -j
make install

cd ~/vendor/ncurses-6.4
./configure --prefix=$COSMOS --sysconfdir=/zip --datarootdir=/zip/share --exec-prefix=/zip/$ARCH --disable-shared
make clean
make -j
make install

cd ~/vendor/readline-8.2
./configure --prefix=$COSMOS --sysconfdir=/zip --datarootdir=/zip/share --exec-prefix=/zip/$ARCH --disable-shared
make uninstall || true
make clean
make -j
make install

# NOTES:
# 1. You'll need to patch enum { FOO = x } that fails to build into a #define FOO
# 2. You'll need to patch configure.ac so it DOES NOT define USABLE_FIONREAD to 1
# 2. You'll need to patch configure.ac so it DOES NOT define INTERRUPT_INPUT to 1
cd ~/vendor/emacs-28.2
./configure --prefix=$COSMOS --sysconfdir=/zip --datarootdir=/zip/share --exec-prefix=/zip/$ARCH \
            --without-x --with-threads --without-gnutls --disable-silent-rules --with-file-notification=no
make uninstall || true
make clean
make -j
make install

Once you've completed this build process, you'll have the ELF files /opt/cosmos/x86_64/bin/emacs and /opt/cosmos/aarch64/bin/emacs. Your next move is to combine them into a single pristine emacs.com file.

cd /zip
COSMO=${COSMO:-/opt/cosmo}
mkdir -p /opt/cosmos/bin
apelink \
  -o /opt/cosmos/bin/emacs.com \
  -l "$COSMO/o//ape/ape.elf" \
  -l "$COSMO/o/aarch64/ape/ape.elf" \
  -M "$COSMO/ape/ape-m1.c" \
  /opt/cosmos/x86_64/bin/emacs \
  /opt/cosmos/aarch64/bin/emacs
cd /zip
zip -r /opt/cosmos/bin/emacs.com \
    aarch64/libexec \
    x86_64/libexec \
    share/terminfo \
    $(find share/emacs -type f |
        grep -v '\.el.gz$' |
        grep -v refcards |
        grep -v images)

You can now scp your emacs.com build to seven operating systems for two distinct kinds of microprocessors without any dependencies. All the LISP, zoneinfo, and termcap files it needs are stored inside the ZIP structure of the binary, which has performance that's equivalent to the Linux filesystem (even though it decompresses artifacts on the fly!) For this reason, you might actually find that fat APE Emacs goes faster if you're using an operating system like Windows where files are go slow.

If you like to use Vim instead of Emacs, then you can build that too. However Vim's build system makes it a bit harder, since it's configured to always strip binaries. The apelink program needs the symbol tables to still be there when it creates the fat version. Otherwise tools like --ftrace won't work.

Monolithic Source Builds

Cosmopolitan can be compiled from source on any Linux distro. First, you need to download or clone the repository.

wget https://justine.lol/cosmopolitan/cosmopolitan.tar.gz
tar xf cosmopolitan.tar.gz  # see releases page
cd cosmopolitan

This will build the entire repository and run all the tests:

build/bootstrap/make.com
o//examples/hello.com
find o -name \*.com | xargs ls -rShal | less

If you get an error running make.com then it's probably because you have WINE installed to binfmt_misc. You can fix that by installing the the APE loader as an interpreter. It'll improve build performance too!

bin/ape-install

Since the Cosmopolitan repository is very large, you might only want to build a particular thing. Cosmopolitan's build config does a good job at having minimal deterministic builds. For example, if you wanted to build only hello.com then you could do that as follows:

build/bootstrap/make.com o//examples/hello.com

Sometimes it's desirable to build a subset of targets, without having to list out each individual one. You can do that by asking make to build a directory name. For example, if you wanted to build only the targets and subtargets of the chibicc package including its tests, you would say:

build/bootstrap/make.com o//third_party/chibicc
o//third_party/chibicc/chibicc.com --help

Cosmopolitan provides a variety of build modes. For example, if you want really tiny binaries (as small as 12kb in size) then you'd say:

build/bootstrap/make.com m=tiny

Here's some other build modes you can try:

build/bootstrap/make.com m=dbg       # asan + ubsan + debug
build/bootstrap/make.com m=asan      # production memory safety
build/bootstrap/make.com m=opt       # -march=native optimizations
build/bootstrap/make.com m=rel       # traditional release binaries
build/bootstrap/make.com m=optlinux  # optimal linux-only performance
build/bootstrap/make.com m=fastbuild # build 28% faster w/o debugging
build/bootstrap/make.com m=tinylinux # tiniest linux-only 4kb binaries

For further details, see //build/config.mk.

Cosmopolitan Amalgamation

Another way to use Cosmopolitan is via our amalgamated release, where we've combined everything into a single static archive and a single header file. If you're doing your development work on Linux or BSD then you need just five files to get started. Here's what you do on Linux:

wget https://justine.lol/cosmopolitan/cosmopolitan-amalgamation-3.0.zip
unzip cosmopolitan-amalgamation-3.0.zip
printf 'main() { printf("hello world\\n"); }\n' >hello.c
gcc -g -Os -static -nostdlib -nostdinc -fno-pie -no-pie -mno-red-zone \
  -fno-omit-frame-pointer -pg -mnop-mcount -mno-tls-direct-seg-refs -gdwarf-4 \
  -o hello.com.dbg hello.c -fuse-ld=bfd -Wl,-T,ape.lds -Wl,--gc-sections \
  -Wl,-z,common-page-size=0x1000 -Wl,-z,max-page-size=0x1000 \
  -include cosmopolitan.h crt.o ape-no-modify-self.o cosmopolitan.a
objcopy -S -O binary hello.com.dbg hello.com

You now have a portable program.

./hello.com
bash -c './hello.com'  # older zsh/fish workaround (patched in zsh 5.9 and fish 3.3.0)

If ./hello.com executed on Linux throws an error about not finding an interpreter, it should be fixed by running the following command (although note that it may not survive a system restart):

sudo sh -c "echo ':APE:M::MZqFpD::/bin/sh:' >/proc/sys/fs/binfmt_misc/register"

If the same command produces puzzling errors on WSL or WINE when using Redbean 2.x, they may be fixed by disabling binfmt_misc:

sudo sh -c 'echo -1 >/proc/sys/fs/binfmt_misc/status'

Since we used the ape-no-modify-self.o bootloader (rather than ape.o) your executable will not modify itself when it's run. What it'll instead do, is extract a 4kb program (the APE loader) to ${TMPDIR:-${HOME:-.}} that maps your program into memory without needing to copy it. The APE loader must be in an executable location (e.g. not stored on a noexec mount) for it to run. See below for alternatives:

It's possible to install the APE loader systemwide as follows.

# System-Wide APE Install
# for Linux, Darwin, and BSDs
# 1. Copies APE Loader to /usr/bin/ape
# 2. Registers w/ binfmt_misc too if Linux
bin/ape-install

# System-Wide APE Uninstall
# for Linux, Darwin, and BSDs
bin/ape-uninstall

It's also possible to convert APE binaries into the system-local format by using the --assimilate flag. Please note that if binfmt_misc is in play, you'll need to unregister it temporarily before doing this, since the assimilate feature is part of the shell script header.

$ file hello.com
hello.com: DOS/MBR boot sector
./hello.com --assimilate
$ file hello.com
hello.com: ELF 64-bit LSB executable

Now that you're up and running with Cosmopolitan Libc and APE, here's some of the most important troubleshooting tools APE offers that you should know, in case you encounter any issues:

./hello.com --strace   # log system calls to stderr
./hello.com --ftrace   # log function calls to stderr

Do you love tiny binaries? If so, you may not be happy with Cosmo adding heavyweight features like tracing to your binaries by default. In that case, you may want to consider using our build system:

make m=tiny

Which will cause programs such as hello.com and life.com to shrink from 60kb in size to about 16kb. There's also a prebuilt amalgamation online https://justine.lol/cosmopolitan/cosmopolitan-tiny.zip hosted on our download page https://justine.lol/cosmopolitan/download.html.

GDB

Here's the recommended ~/.gdbinit config:

set host-charset UTF-8
set target-charset UTF-8
set target-wide-charset UTF-8
set osabi none
set complaints 0
set confirm off
set history save on
set history filename ~/.gdb_history
define asm
  layout asm
  layout reg
end
define src
  layout src
  layout reg
end
src

You normally run the .com.dbg file under gdb. If you need to debug the .com file itself, then you can load the debug symbols independently as

gdb foo.com -ex 'add-symbol-file foo.com.dbg 0x401000'

Alternative Development Environments

MacOS

If you're developing on MacOS you can install the GNU compiler collection for x86_64-elf via homebrew:

brew install x86_64-elf-gcc

Then in the above scripts just replace gcc and objcopy with x86_64-elf-gcc and x86_64-elf-objcopy to compile your APE binary.

Windows

If you're developing on Windows then you need to download an x86_64-pc-linux-gnu toolchain beforehand. See the Compiling on Windows tutorial. It's needed because the ELF object format is what makes universal binaries possible.

Cosmopolitan officially only builds on Linux. However, one highly experimental (and currently broken) thing you could try, is building the entire cosmo repository from source using the cross9 toolchain.

mkdir -p o/third_party
rm -rf o/third_party/gcc
wget https://justine.lol/linux-compiler-on-windows/cross9.zip
unzip cross9.zip
mv cross9 o/third_party/gcc
build/bootstrap/make.com

Discord Chatroom

The Cosmopolitan development team collaborates on the Redbean Discord server. You're welcome to join us! https://discord.gg/FwAVVu7eJ4

Support Vector

Platform	Min Version	Circa
AMD	K8 Venus	2005
Intel	Core	2006
Linux	2.6.18	2007
Windows	8 [1]	2012
Mac OS X	15.6	2018
OpenBSD	7	2021
FreeBSD	13	2020
NetBSD	9.2	2021

[1] See our vista branch for a community supported version of Cosmopolitan that works on Windows Vista and Windows 7.

Special Thanks

Funding for this project is crowdsourced using GitHub Sponsors and Patreon. Your support is what makes this project possible. Thank you! We'd also like to give special thanks to the following groups and individuals:

• Joe Drumgoole
• Rob Figueiredo
• Wasmer

For publicly sponsoring our work at the highest tier.