APE — the Actually Portable Executable

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Andrew Lee
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APE — the Actually Portable Executable

#1 Post by Andrew Lee »

One EXE to rule them all! :D

Color Us Impressed: Redbean Runs a Web Server on Six Operating Systems
The holy grail of computing is to have some way to distribute a program to any computer. This is one of those totally unachievable goals, but many have tried with varying degrees of success. People naturally think of Java, but even before that there was UCSD’s P-code and many other attempts to pull off the same trick. We were impressed, though, with Redbean 2.0 which uses a single executable file to run a webserver — or possibly other things — on six different operating systems. If the six operating systems were all flavors of Linux or Windows that wouldn’t be very interesting. But thanks to APE — the Actually Portable Executable — format, you can run under Windows, Linux, MacOS, OpenBSD, NetBSD, and FreeBSD.

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SYSTEM
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Re: APE — the Actually Portable Executable

#2 Post by SYSTEM »

It's an impressive technological achievement for sure. A short explanation from the author about how it works: https://justine.lol/ape.html
My YouTube channel | Release date of my 13th playlist: August 24, 2020

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juverax
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Re: APE — the Actually Portable Executable

#3 Post by juverax »

redbean malicious? ( https://redbean.dev/ )

redbean-2.0.14 Score on VirusTotal = 12-71
redbean-demo-2.0.14 Score on VirusTotal = 15-69

Could this be normal, given this type of software?
Note that the "source code" is provided at https://redbean.dev/#source . . . (the "main" c file starts with 100-ish #INCLUDE .... )

Anyway, an interesting endeavor!

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Andrew Lee
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Re: APE — the Actually Portable Executable

#4 Post by Andrew Lee »

I wouldn't be surprised VirusTotal freaked out over redbean :D

First you have the unconventional .COM content.

Then you are actually tacking on content at the end of the ZIP container!

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