If you build a static ELF executable in `ld -q` mode (which leaves rela
sections inside the binary) then you can run it through the elf2pe.com
program afterwards, which will turn it into a PE executable. We have a
new trick for defining WIN32 DLL imports in C without any assembly code.
This also achieves the optimally tiny and perfect PE binary structure.
We need this because it isn't possible to have a GNU ld linker script
generate a PE file where the virtual pointer and the file pointer can
drift apart. This post-linker can do that. One cool benefit is we can
now use a smaller 512-byte alignment in the file, and an even bigger
64kb alignment for the segment virtual addresses, and the executable
ends up being smaller.
Another program introduced by this change is pecheck.com which can do
extensive linting of PE static executables to help explain why Windows
won't load it.
The build/bootstrap/ar.com program is now tinier. This change reduces
its size from 140kb to 53kb. Nothing was traded away. Cosmopolitan Ar
performance is now 2x better than llvm-ar largely thanks to using the
copy_file_range() system call. This change homebrews a new allocation
API that addresses the shortcomings of the C standard library design.
Using these new balloc() and reballoc() functions I managed to reduce
memory consumption so much that Cosmpolitan Ar should now use roughly
100x fewer bytes of peak resident memory compared to llvm-ar. Correct
behavior with better compatibility has been assured. Binary output is
now pretty much bit-identical to llvm-ar, as of this change. This can
and should be the living proof we need to show that a better world is
possible for software.
