Week 9 Session: Could it run unmodified?

Establish what it would take to run your target as a binary rather than as source, and price the answer

26 April 2027

The question sounds like a yes or no and is really a cost estimate.

Can you even get a binary? A static build for the architecture you would emulate. For some targets this is a download; for others it is a cross-compile that takes the session; for a few it is the point at which you discover the project has never been built for anything but x86-64.

What would have to be implemented underneath it? This is where week 5’s inventory earns its keep. A translation layer that skips the kernel has to provide every syscall the binary makes — so the inventory is the specification, and anything you missed is a crash rather than a warning.

And what will it cost? Interpreters are roughly an order of magnitude. Translation can approach native. Measure something rather than quoting a number: start it, time it, and record what the time was actually spent on.

If your target is a language runtime, ask the question this week is built around: does it generate code at runtime? If it does, you have just found the ceiling on every ahead-of-time approach, and you should say so in your evidence log now rather than discovering it in week 12.

Bring: whether a binary exists, what it would need, and one measured number.