Re: [musl] Advocating musl to in windows subsystem and OS X

[Luca Barbato <lu_zero@gentoo.org>]

On 12/06/2020 19:37, Rich Felker wrote:
> On Fri, Jun 12, 2020 at 06:56:28PM +0200, Brian Peregrine wrote:
>> Hey all,
>>
>> after thinking about my previous post (Advocating musl to the chromium
>> OS developers ), it struck me that both Microsoft and Apple use some
>> sort of libc too (Microsoft has the "subsystem for linux" on windows
>> 10 now, and Apple's OS X is based on linux too -I think it was based
>> on the "Darwin" linux distro.
> 
> No, OSX is in some sense a BSD fork, but with major architectural
> changes, and has nothing to do with Linux. Their libc is a BSD one
> (FreeBSD I think) with tons of gratuitous changes made that did little
> but intentionally break things, basically for NIH purposes/justifying
> the existence of the project. (This is much like Google's Fuchsia fork
> of musl.)
> 
> musl does not run on OSX and while all of the pure-library code and
> stdio code could in principle be used, actually making "musl for OSX"
> would be a large project that doesn't make sense. What would make much
> more sense is either reusing code or making corresponding improvements
> based on things that are better in musl.
> 
>> Microsoft probably uses glibc (as the subsystem seems to be
>> canonical-made and they use glibc in ubuntu), for os x, I'm not sure
>> what is being used.
>> See https://itsfoss.com/install-bash-on-windows/
>> https://www.makeuseof.com/tag/microsoft-linux-distros-windows-10/
>> https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3601092
>>
>> In either case, Rich, perhaps you can propose to both that they use
>> musl,
> 
> In some sense WSL doesn't "use" any libc; it's a thin syscall
> emulation layer (WSL1) or near-full-linux-vm (WSL2) that's supposed to
> be able to run any Linux userspace. My understanding is that they ship
> some glibc-based distro, and I don't see that being viable for them to
> change because they're supporting whatever users have built on it, but
> anyone's free to use whatever they prefer.
> 
> On a higher level, I don't really want anyone shipping musl in places
> where the end user who receives it doesn't intend to use musl, for
> much the same reason that I don't like it when distros ship systemd to
> folks who don't intend to use systemd. It leads to gratuitous
> complaints from people who are unhappy that it's different from what
> they expect, and keep asking for changes to make it more glibc-like.
> I'd much rather seek out a user base that *wants* what's different
> about musl rather than "puts up with" what's different about musl.

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/p/alpine-wsl/9p804crf0395#activetab=pivot:overviewtab

This seems available.

lu