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Bandwidth and storage space are cheap; hassle is expensive. I can't tell you the number of times I've ended up cursing the IT gods while sorting out some helli
by Kadin 10y ago
Bandwidth and storage space are cheap; hassle is expensive.
I can't tell you the number of times I've ended up cursing the IT gods while sorting out some hellish dependency / shared-libary-versioning fiasco (and apps that use ffmpeg and other media libraries are especially prone to this), and wished I could have just gotten a statically-compiled binary off of the developer's CI server instead.
Most of the arguments for shared libraries seem like a misplaced optimization on modern systems (e.g. saves disk space, saves distribution bandwidth), or don't really shake out in reality (e.g. "only have one copy of a crypto library so it's easy to update!") and just lead to a proliferation of library versions on the same system.
- voltagex_ 10y agoI spent most of last week using 2-8 megabit LTE as my only network connection. Bandwidth is not always cheap.
- andyfleming 10y agoTrue, but time is more valuable.
- shakna 10y agoThe most I get here is 1.5 megabits. Yes, Australia. Yes, a terrible data cap: 100GB. Electron apps don't get downloaded. One app is one less Netflix video I can watch.
- shakna 10y agomusl lets you have statically linked C nice and easy. (glibc can't really be made static). It produces executables that can fit on a floppy disc even for large stuff. Alpine has a statically linked ffmpeg, though it can be difficult to compile occasionally. Bandwidth can be cheap, depending on where you are, but giant applications just sort of smell of "get it working now" instead of "make sure it will give the user a good experience".