PLs like Scheme have explored the minimum set of primitives to offer. What about portable file I/O and networking?
miniblog.
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Distributing binaries built against musl is counter-intuitive to me. When I run them on my machine, they're dynamically linked to glibc!
The main advantage AIUI is that you don't depend on new glibc features, so you get a more portable executable.
Zig has moved to a compiler bootstrap approach that uses webassembly: https://ziglang.org/news/goodbye-cpp/
They check in the wasm artifact and provide their own wasm compiler. wasm is the most portable backend supported by LLVM.
OCaml does something similar! It includes a minimal VM.
Emacs 27, with harfbuzz for fonts, arbitrary sized ints, native JSON parsing, and portable dumping replacing unexec!