Re: Feature request: building musl in a portable way

[Rich Felker <dalias@libc.org>]

On Fri, Dec 22, 2017 at 06:01:35PM +0000, Nicholas Wilson wrote:
> On 22 December 2017 17:49, Rich Felker wrote:
> > A bit of a historical note on this: in the late 80s and 90s there was
> > an effort called "iBCS" to make a unified ABI for Intel-based unices.
> > I believe a common syscall layer was part of it. It was abandoned
> > after everybody realized that the Linux syscall ABI _was_, for all
> > practical purposes, the unified ABI they wanted.
> 
> That's pretty much where WebAssembly is going too! At the moment,
> the WebAssembly "embedding environment" (the webpage) has to provide
> a JavaScript implementation of the external dependencies of the
> WebAssembly module.
> 
> There is a desire to eventually standardise that a bit - at the
> moment it's "whatever Musl wants". I think the conclusion will be
> "emulate Linux everywhere". I'm expecting some small tweaks though.
> For example, traditionally timezone information is stored in
> userland and not available via a syscall: rather than special-case
> SYS_open for "/etc/localtime", we might add a Wasm-specific syscall
> for doing it. (Naturally, this would all be done in Wasm via an
> override in a Wasm-specific directory.)

Wouldn't just exporting a TZ variable be easier?

Rich