I really appreciate tooling that is written in Rust or Go that produce single binaries with minimal runtime dependencies.
Getting tooling written in for example Python to run reliably can be an exercise in frustration due to runtime environmental dependencies.
Why have an OS at all if every program is just going to package everything it needs?
It feels like we cheapened out. Rather than get good & figure out how to manage things well, rather than driver harder, we're bunting the problem. It sucks & it's lo-fi & a huge waste of resources.
As a long time Linux desktop user, I appreciate any efforts to improve compatibility between distros. Since Linux isn't actually an operating system, successfully running software built for Ubuntu on a Fedora box, for example, is entirely based on luck.
Where-as with the conventional dynamic library world one would just update openssl or whomever & keep going. Or if someone wanted to shim in an alternate but compatible library, one could. I personally never saw the binary compatibility issue as very big, and generally felt like there was a while where folks were getting good at packaging apps for each OS, making extra repos, that we've lost. So it seems predominantly to me like downsides, that we sell ourselves on, based off of outsized/overrepresented fear & negativity.
the computational model of a fleet of long-lived servers, which receive host/OS updates at one cadence, and serve applications that are deployed at a different cadence, is at this point a niche use case, basically anachronistic, and going away
applications are the things that matter, they provide the value, the OS and even shared libraries are really optimizations, details, that don't really make sense any more
the unit of maintenance is not a host, or a specific library, it's an application
vulnerabilities affect applications, if there is a vulnerability in some library that's used by a bunch of my applications then it's expected that i will need to re-deploy updated versions of those applications, this is not difficult, i am re-deploying updated versions of my applications all the time, because that is my deployment model
Beyond app delivery there's dozens of different utils folks rely on in their day to day. The new statically compiled world requiring each of these to be well maintained & promptly updated feels like an obvious regression.
Linux distros are thankfully moving towards embracing static linking, rather than putting their heads in the sand and pretending that dynamic linking isn't on its last legs.
Dynamic linking on *nix has nothing to do with 70s era programming languages.
Did you consider the possibility that the incompatibility between monomorphization (possibly the dumbest term in all of programming) and dynamic linking should perhaps saying something about monomorphization, instead?
Given that dynamic linking as a concept came out of the C world, it has everything to do with them.
> Did you consider the possibility that the incompatibility between monomorphization (possibly the dumbest term in all of programming) and dynamic linking should perhaps saying something about monomorphization, instead?
Yes, I considered that possibility.
What elements of dynamic linking do you see as being connected to "70s era programming languages"?
> Yes, I considered that possibility.
Then I would urge you to reconsider.
there is no practical downside to a program including all of its dependencies, when evaluated against the alternative of those dependencies being determined at runtime and based on arbitrary state of the host system
monomorphization is good, not bad
the contents of /usr/lib/whatever should not impact the success or failure of executing a given program
There's also the problem that dynamic loading relies on almost all the same mechanisms as dynamic linking, so you can't get rid of those mechanisms just because your main build process used static linking.
smaller executable sizes, shared code in memory, synchronized security updates, are all basically value-zero, in any modern infrastructure
there is no "growing chorus" of developers or users saying otherwise, it is in fact precisely the opposite, statically linked binaries are going extremely well, they are very clearly the future
> smaller executable sizes, shared code in memory, synchronized security updates, are all basically value-zero, in any modern infrastructure
This highlights the fact that you're extremely focused on one particular model of development, one where a single person or group deploys software that they are responsible for running and maintaining - often software that they've written themselves.
This is, obviously, an extremely appropriate paradigm for the enterprise. Static linking makes a lot of sense here. Python's virtual environments are basically the approved workaround for the fact that Python was built for systems that are not statically linked, and I cherish it for exactly that reason. Use Go on your servers - I do myself! But that doesn't mean it's appropriate everywhere.
Sometimes developers in this mindset forget there's a whole other world out there, a world of personal computers, that each have hundreds or thousands of applications installed. Applications on these systems are not deployed, they are installed. The mechanism by which this happens (on Linux) is via distributions and maintainers, and dynamic linking needs to be understood as designed for that ecosystem. Linux operating systems are built around making things simple, reliable, and secure for collections of software that are built and distributed by maintainers.
I'm firmly on the side of the fence that says that dynamic linking is the correct way to do that. All the benefits you mention are just a free bonus, of course, but I care about them as well. Smaller executable sizes? Huge win on my 256 GB SSD. Synchronized security updates? Of course I care about those as an end user!
it's not that i forget about these use cases, it's that i don't really consider them relevant
tooling that supports industrial use cases like mine is not really able to support end-user use cases like yours at the same time
linux operating systems may have at one point been built around making things as you describe by distribution maintainers, but that model is anachronistic and no longer useful to the overwhelming majority of its user base, the huge majority of software is neither built nor distributed by maintainers, it is built and distributed by private enterprises
In a way they are. You deploy it to the store and then as people's computers download the update automatically.
A counter example to your claims about Linux is Android. Libraries are not shared between apps (beyond the android framework and libc). This is despite the fact that phones have limited storage.
> it's not that i forget about these use cases, it's that i don't really consider them relevant
Yes, exactly! It's an extremely myopic vision. You've spent this long thread arguing against dynamic linking on the basis of what is only a small fraction of total human / computer interactions! By "not relevant" you mean not relevant to the enterprise. I grant that of course - but these uses cases are (by definition) relevant to hundreds of millions of PC users.
> the huge majority of software is neither built nor distributed by maintainers, it is built and distributed by private enterprises
The overwhelming majority of the software I run is built and distributed by maintainers. Literally, there are only a few exceptions, like static-built games that rarely or never change and are (unfortunately) closed source. I daresay that's true for the majority of Linux users - the vast majority of the software we install and use is not "built and distributed by private enterprises".
This reality is what Linux-on-the-desktop is built for. There are millions of people who are going to want to continue using computers this way, and people like me will continue contributing to and developing distributions for this use case, even if shipping static or closed-source binaries to Linux users becomes common.
You raise the world of personal computers. And I think dynamic linking is absolutely a choice that has huge advantages for these folks.
There's other realms too. Embedded software needs smaller systems, so the dynamic library savings can be huge there. Hyper-scaler systems, where thousands of workloads can be running concurrently, can potentially scale to much much much higher usages with dynamic linking.
It's a little far afield, but with systems like webasssembly we're really looking less at a couple orgs within a company each shipping a monolith or two, and we're potentially looking way more at having lots of very small functions with a couple helper libraries interacting. This isn't exactly a classic dynamic library, but especially with the very safe sandboxing built in, the ideal model is far closer to something like dynamic linking where each library can be shared than it is shared.
like i'm not sure you understand the scale of enterprise linux. a single organization of not-that-very-many people can easily create and destroy hundreds of millions of deployed systems every day, each with a novel configuration of installed software. i've seen it countless times.
1. My point about Linux on the desktop is that there are in practice users like me who are already getting the (many) advantages of dynamic linking, and don't want to give up those advantages. To the point that some of us are going to support and work on distributions that continue the traditional Linux way in this area. In your view, the ecosystem has moved to software being built and distributed by private corporations. I don't think this has happened - on Windows software was always built and distributed this way; on (desktop) Linux it never was and largely still isn't!
2. My point about the desktop in general is that this use case matters to the vast majority of computer-using human beings much more than enterprise. The number of deployed containers that get created and destroyed every day doesn't change that fact, nor does the fact that Linux users are merely a tiny fraction of this desktop use case. This is what creates the myopia I was talking about - you're thinking about metrics like "number of systems deployed" whereas I'm thinking of number of human-computer interactions that are impacted. I don't think you can just discard what matters on the desktop or paint it as irrelevant. Desktop computing shouldn't be subordinate to the technical requirements of servers!
So to summarize the argument: (a) desktop use cases still matter because they comprise the majority of human-computer interactions, (b) dynamic linking and the maintainer model are the superior approach for desktop computing, and in fact complement each other in important ways, and (c) even if most desktop users can't take advantage of this model because of the dominance of closed source software and the corporate development model, desktop Linux can and does, and will hopefully continue to do so into the future.
i guess this is the crux of the discussion
linux desktop computing for sure _is_ subordinate to linux server computing, by any reasonable usage metric
i'm not trying to deny your experience in any way, nor suggest that dynamic linking goes away, or anything like that -- your use case is real, linux on the desktop is real, that use case isn't going away
but it is pretty clear at this point that linux on the server is wildly successful, linux on mobile is successful (for android), and that linux on the desktop is at best a niche use case
the majority of human interactions with linux occur via applications, services, tools, etc. that are served by linux servers, and not by software running on local machines like desktops or laptops
linux is a server operating system first and foremost
and where is the growth potential? is the industrial need going to become greatly newly empowered & helpful to this planet, to us? will it deliver & share the value potential out there? PC may be a smaller factor today, but i for one am incredibly fantastically excited to imagine a potential future 10 years from now where people start to PC again, albeit in a different way.
individual PCs have no chance. it's why the cloud has won. on-demand access wherever you are, consistent experience across devices is incredibly incredibly convenient. but networks of PCs that work well together is exciting, and we've only so very recently started emerging the capability to have nice easy to manage ops/automated multi-machine personal-computing. we've only recently emerged to maturity where a better, competitive personal computing is really conceivable.
it's been the alpha linux geeks learning how to compute and industrial players learning how to compute, and the invisible hand has been fat happy & plump from it, but imo there's such a huge potential here to re-open computing to persons, to create compelling interesting differently-capable sovereign/owned computing systems, that are free from so many of the small tatters & deprevations & enshittifications that cloud- that doing everyting on other people's computers as L-Users- unnerringly drops on us. we should & could be a more powerful, more technically-cultural culture, and i think we've severely underrated how much subtle progress there's been to make that a much less awful, specialized, painful, time-consuming, low-availability, disconnected effort than it used to be.