2 ms·

macOS and Windows have shared libraries. Packaging third party libraries with your binary is just going to lead to a race to see which fucks a user first: runn

• alkonaut 9y ago
  Exactly. And yet for 99% I’d desktop use I’ll rather buy disks and risk security holes, than suffer shared library hell. I have been screwed by library compatibility hell 100 times for every time I suffered a disk space issue or a vulnerability issue. At the end of the day if it’s a hard requirement that you want to be able to just run binary packages that were created by idiots - then the smartphone app model is the only viable one. It’s important that components that do have significant attack surface such as TLS are provided and patched by the OS. The shared libraries of e.g windows come in pretty well defined tiers. Things that the OS provides, various optional runtimes that must or can be shared such as msvcrt and then there is not much else. No app is going to install a “system wide” image decoder or other utility lib (In the past, it was a thing to dump a dll into the OS folder, often overwriting older ones, which is where the term “DLL hell” comes from. Luckily that doesn’t happen these days).