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It's very hard. Incompatible glibc ABIs make this nigh impossible, there's a reason Steam installs a vcredistributable.dll for pretty much every game on Windows

It's very hard. Incompatible glibc ABIs make this nigh impossible, there's a reason Steam installs a vcredistributable.dll for pretty much every game on Windows. On Linux Steam distributes an entire runtime environment based on an ancient Ubuntu release exactly to circumvent this problem. Look no further than the hoops you need jump through to distribute a Linux binary on PyPI [1]. Despite tons of engineering effort, and lots of hoop jumping from packagers, getting a non-trivial binary to run across all distros is still considered functionally impossible. [1]: https://github.com/pypa/manylinux https://github.com/pypa/manylinux

seba_dos1 4y ago
Steam distributes an entire runtime environment because it's a platform that's being targeted by 3rd party developers, who often make mistakes that Steam Runtime tries quite hard to reconcile. When all you care about it's your own app, you're in power to compile things however you want and bundle whatever you want with it, at which point it's honestly not that hard. Building in a container is a breeze, tooling is top notch, images with old distros are one command away, testing is easy; in practice I had much more trouble compiling stuff for Windows than for old GNU/Linux distros.
- nickelpro 4y ago
  It's easy to compile an entirely new binary for every platform/distro, and it's easy to bundle an entire execution environment along with a single binary using docker, what's hard is compiling a single binary and have it run across all distros and execution environments.
  - seba_dos1 4y ago
    "Across all distros" - sure, that's outright impossible, and for a good reason. "Across all distros that matter" - no, it's not. How do you think Electron apps distributed in binary form work fine across various distributions?
  - account42 4y ago
    It really isn't that hard to get a single binary that works across glibc-based distros. Just compile against the oldest version of glibc/Xlib/etc. you want to support and bundle all non-system libraries, statically linking them with symbols hidden if possible. We are not talking out of our ass here - I myself do this for all the software I maintain and just works. Tons of programs are released this way.

seba_dos1 4y ago

Steam distributes an entire runtime environment because it's a platform that's being targeted by 3rd party developers, who often make mistakes that Steam Runtime tries quite hard to reconcile. When all you care about it's your own app, you're in power to compile things however you want and bundle whatever you want with it, at which point it's honestly not that hard. Building in a container is a breeze, tooling is top notch, images with old distros are one command away, testing is easy; in practice I had much more trouble compiling stuff for Windows than for old GNU/Linux distros.

nickelpro 4y ago
It's easy to compile an entirely new binary for every platform/distro, and it's easy to bundle an entire execution environment along with a single binary using docker, what's hard is compiling a single binary and have it run across all distros and execution environments.
- seba_dos1 4y ago
  "Across all distros" - sure, that's outright impossible, and for a good reason. "Across all distros that matter" - no, it's not. How do you think Electron apps distributed in binary form work fine across various distributions?
- account42 4y ago
  It really isn't that hard to get a single binary that works across glibc-based distros. Just compile against the oldest version of glibc/Xlib/etc. you want to support and bundle all non-system libraries, statically linking them with symbols hidden if possible. We are not talking out of our ass here - I myself do this for all the software I maintain and just works. Tons of programs are released this way.