4 ms·

The Rust ecosystem does a lot of what it does by mostly punting on dynamic linking. The community is happy to compile the world and distribute it in a staticall

The Rust ecosystem does a lot of what it does by mostly punting on dynamic linking. The community is happy to compile the world and distribute it in a statically-linked binary. This makes things a lot easier on both developers and end users but does not in theory scale well with increasing adoption (end users have a bunch of huge binaries bundling the same subset of libraries which all get hit with zero-days at the same time but are updated piecemeal across the apps bundling them). The tooling and package management stories are a similar case - they haven't fragmented yet, but as adoption increases you start having to deal with shit like packages from obscure hardware vendors and commercial language tooling - including compilers, providing functionality either absent from or superior to what's available in in the de-facto-standard project templates. Examples from my experience would be things like the Intel C++ toolchain, MPI compiler wrappers on supercomputers, and vendor-provided toolchains targeting alternative devices like CUDA. Perhaps their community will deal with these challenges in a super-elegant way, I'm not ruling it out. But I'll believe it when I see it.

notriddle 6y ago
The thing is, half of what you described is basically a Linux-ism. It's irrelevant on Mac, Windows, Android, and iOS, where the operating system is a monolith that applications depend on. Technically, it might be made up of multiple libraries, but the OS is almost guaranteed to be present in full, and it's the only thing that can be guaranteed to be present, and it might use integration systems that applications cannot or rarely use (VDSO, NTDLL, syscalls obviously, but also stuff like the System calling convention). Or you might just use IPC for all components, like Plan 9. It's also irrelevant if you're using a bare metal machine with no filesystem, a system with a weird linking paradigm like webassembly, or if your app basically owns the entire computer.

notriddle 6y ago

The thing is, half of what you described is basically a Linux-ism. It's irrelevant on Mac, Windows, Android, and iOS, where the operating system is a monolith that applications depend on. Technically, it might be made up of multiple libraries, but the OS is almost guaranteed to be present in full, and it's the only thing that can be guaranteed to be present, and it might use integration systems that applications cannot or rarely use (VDSO, NTDLL, syscalls obviously, but also stuff like the System calling convention). Or you might just use IPC for all components, like Plan 9. It's also irrelevant if you're using a bare metal machine with no filesystem, a system with a weird linking paradigm like webassembly, or if your app basically owns the entire computer.