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.
> Then I would urge you to reconsider.
Done. No change to my beliefs.