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I'm not much for Rust, but I'm essentially a deploy/tooling engineer and supporting a build system for hundreds of engineers and tens-thousands of servers. I'v

I'm not much for Rust, but I'm essentially a deploy/tooling engineer and supporting a build system for hundreds of engineers and tens-thousands of servers. I've worked in a few dozen languages at this point and have seen 20 years of the problems in this field. I'm going to tell you that static linking is the only way to go. The idea that needs to die is the personal workstation. It's just another deploy target. Ideally whatever is doing builds is reproducible and throwaway. Leaving those artifacts around on disk introduces its own host of problems. Disk is cheap and you shouldn't have tons of binaries on your systems for no good reason. (Aside from this though, I'm in full agreement with Theo.)

dmitrygr 7y ago
> Disk is cheap Arguable, but I'll grant you this. But RAM ain't cheap.
- acdha 7y ago
  It’s a lot cheaper than it’s been in the past, especially for what we’re talking about: people are using more data these days but the kinds of system shared libraries where common page mapping helps has seemed like diminishing returns for years, both as a fraction of private data size and because applications don’t sync their dependencies so you end up with multiple versions of each library cutting into the savings.
- busterarm 7y ago
  Single Responsibility Principle except apply it to infrastructure. We're in a world where both virtualization and containerization are the norm and with either flavor this is easy. Each of your virtualized/containerized systems are going to have their own distinct instances of the shared libraries, so you're getting a fraction of the benefits of dynamic linking if you're doing your infrastructure properly today anyway. Stop keeping pets. How many of these big binaries are you running on your servers at once?
  - folmar 7y ago
    > Each of your virtualized/containerized systems are going to have their own distinct instances of the shared libraries, Certainly not mine, my memory deduplication is doing just fine.
    - busterarm 7y ago
      We've had various mechanisms for this and some of them have even been deprecated. Transparent Page Sharing was deprecated in VMware as it turned out to not be super useful in large pages. We have Kernel Same-Page Merging but many folks are disabling this in a post-Meltdown/post-Spectre world as the potential vulnerabilities aren't worth it.

dmitrygr 7y ago

> Disk is cheap Arguable, but I'll grant you this. But RAM ain't cheap.

acdha 7y ago
It’s a lot cheaper than it’s been in the past, especially for what we’re talking about: people are using more data these days but the kinds of system shared libraries where common page mapping helps has seemed like diminishing returns for years, both as a fraction of private data size and because applications don’t sync their dependencies so you end up with multiple versions of each library cutting into the savings.
busterarm 7y ago
Single Responsibility Principle except apply it to infrastructure. We're in a world where both virtualization and containerization are the norm and with either flavor this is easy. Each of your virtualized/containerized systems are going to have their own distinct instances of the shared libraries, so you're getting a fraction of the benefits of dynamic linking if you're doing your infrastructure properly today anyway. Stop keeping pets. How many of these big binaries are you running on your servers at once?
- folmar 7y ago
  > Each of your virtualized/containerized systems are going to have their own distinct instances of the shared libraries, Certainly not mine, my memory deduplication is doing just fine.
  - busterarm 7y ago
    We've had various mechanisms for this and some of them have even been deprecated. Transparent Page Sharing was deprecated in VMware as it turned out to not be super useful in large pages. We have Kernel Same-Page Merging but many folks are disabling this in a post-Meltdown/post-Spectre world as the potential vulnerabilities aren't worth it.