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201 points generichuman | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0.206s | source
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Jeaye ◴[] No.43552616[source]
I don't understand why they don't just statically link their binaries. First, they said this:

> Even if you managed to statically link GLIBC—or used an alternative like musl—your application would be unable to load any dynamic libraries at runtime.

But then they immediately said they actually statically link all of their deps aside from libc.

> Instead, we take a different approach: statically linking everything we can.

If they're statically linking everything other than libc, then using musl or statically linking glibc will finish the job. Unless they have some need for loading share libs at runtime which they didn't already have linked into their binary (i.e. manual dlopen), this solves the portability problem on Linux.

What am I missing (assuming I know of the security implications of statically linked binaries -- which they didn't mention as a concern)?

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1. zer0zzz ◴[] No.43552822[source]
Static linking makes it impossible for a library to evolve external to applications. That’s not a great outcome for a lot of reasons.