Make assembly jars Actually Portable Executables (500USD Bounty)

[lihaoyi]

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From the maintainer Li Haoyi: I'm putting a 500USD bounty on this issue, payable by bank transfer on a merged PR implementing this.

See https://github.com/orgs/com-lihaoyi/discussions/6 for other bounties and the terms and conditions that bounties operate under

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https://justine.lol/ape.html

This should allow us to to get rid of the necessity to rename them to .bat extensions to run them on windows, and allow them to just be run directly regardless of name

Seems like APE supports all the same platforms as Graal does, so the only thing missing would be windows-arm support. https://github.com/jart/cosmopolitan/wiki/Features#systems-and-cpu-arch-supported

[BenraouaneSoufiane]

@lihaoyi can I work on this?

[lihaoyi]

@BenraouaneSoufiane go for it, bounties are open until closed

[kiendang]

@lihaoyi One approach I can think of for this is to compile something like this using cosmopolitan

// not actual C code, massively simplified
int main(int argc, char* argv[]) {
  exec...("java", "-cp", argv[0], "<main class>", <rest of argv>)
}

and prepend the compiled binary to the assembly jar. The resulting out.jar should run cross platform.

[kiendang]

Put up a rough PR at #4503 to illustrate the idea.

[kiendang]

We can go one step further with APE though. There is an ongoing effort to bring Cosmopolitan support to GraalVM, then it's possible to produce cross-platform native images.