A few solid hours hacking on fleet last night got me to a basic C “hello world”. The C library has everything from string.h and the simple character I/O functions from stdio.h, and the kernel has just enough of a driver interface to make simple file operations work. I’m using the legacy serial ports for now, since the drivers are trivial; stdin maps to COM1, stdout is COM2, and stderr writes to the host console via port E9.

This is the part where it starts to get really interesting. If you handwave past the part where most of the C library isn’t there yet, it’s now possible to compile a couple of ordinary C programs, link them against the fleet library, run them in VMs, and pipe data between them in grand old Unix shell style. It’s all very normal- except that these processes are just as comprehensively isolated from each other as if they were running on separate physical machines.