The best example I can think of is the Win32 controls UI (user32/Create window/RegisterClass) in C. You likely can't read the source code for this but you can see how Wine did it or Wine alternatives (like NetBSD's PEACE runtime, now abandoned).
Actually the only toolkit that I know that sort of copied this style is Nakst's Luigi toolkit (also in C).
Neither really used inheritance and use composition with "message passing" sent to different controls.
Vibe coding in the 90s was probably like learning C and pointers for the first time and then deciphering strange errors when you couldn't figure out how scanf worked, so you added asterisks and ampersands to the code until it compiled.
I once spent a couple hours debugging a perl cgi script. Nothing worked. Called in my colleague. Looks fine. We both were tearing our hair out. Sent it to the line printer, ordered pizza, and one of us read the code while the other typed it in. Couple hours later we finished and it worked.
AFAIK Cosmopolitan is missing the sandboxing features of WASM runtimes which would allow to run untrusted code safely, and for x86 vs ARM it uses the universal binary approach (e.g. you'll either have the x86 or the ARM code as dead weight in the executable).
For some reason I pictured this software as a system for developing memory or CPU constrained software. Like granting only 1 mb of memory and maybe having functions executed in a certain number of "clock ticks"
> Less controversially, when you write C, you write for a virtual machine described by the C spec, not your actual hardware.
Isn't this true for most higher level languages as well? C++ for instance builds on top of C and many languages call into and out of C based libraries. Go might be slightly different as it is interacting with slightly less C code (especially if you avoid CGO).
On Fedora this installs 187 MiB. Surely not small, but everything has dependencies and can have issues with them. It is a trade-off. It was an interesting article, though my solution was simple and worked for me.
The One, The Original, The Prophetic (July 1990), The Authentic “Evil Empires: One down, one to go…” bumper sticker, anticipating the obsolescence of railroad era continental-scale empires in the information age.
I wonder if something like this might make a comeback for workers that are blocked from using wsl/hyperv on their corporate laptops. For me I've been using msys2 as an "alternative" since I'm unable to use wsl. It's not the same but it's all I got.
I use WSL1 on my work PC everyday, because I can't run HyperV. I don't have a GUI, but a coworker said he was able to get VNC running on WSL1 and was able to VNC into it from his Windows environment.
At work when I work on Windows (currently stuck using Mac for the first time in my career at work), but on Windows I would use https://gitforwindows.org/ which also uses msys2 and that is a very popularly supported free product using msys2 on Windows. If you ever forget the URL, search for "git bash for windows".
Actually the only toolkit that I know that sort of copied this style is Nakst's Luigi toolkit (also in C).
Neither really used inheritance and use composition with "message passing" sent to different controls.