There's a big subthread on this post about it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32459755 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32459755. Hermetic builds (Ba

There's a big subthread on this post about it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32459755 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32459755. Hermetic builds (Bazel, Nix, etc.) are in some sense orthogonal to packaging and delivery via e.g. a Docker container. It's true that it takes great care to get bit-for-bit identical output from a C/C++ toolchain, and it's also true that very subtle things can send the compiler and linker into a tailspin of "now I inline this and now I don't have room to inline that and now other optimization passes do something different" and whoa, my program just got a lot faster or slower, yikes. I forget the title now, but there was a great Strange Loop talk about how if you do good statistics on repeated builds or even just stuff more or less into `argv` that the difference between `-O2` and `-O3` doesn't hold up (on either `gcc` or `clang`). But whether the final executable is delivered to the target system via Docker or `scp` doesn't change any of that. If you want identical builds the Bazel and Nix people have a high-investment/high-return sales pitch they'd like you to hear :). And it's also true (as another commenter pointed out) that it's at least a little bit reductionist of me to say "Docker gives you static linking". Docker does a zillion things, and for the people using the other stuff, more power to them if it's working well. I would contend that most of them (especially since QEMU emulating x86_64 on your Intel Mac or vice versa isn't really a great story anymore) are not the real selling point though: you already had `virtualenv` and `nvm` and `rustup` and just countless ways to isolate/reproduce everything except the contents of your friendly neighborhood `/usr/lib/...`. If the native compiled code underpinning all of this stuff had all it's symbols linked in, and your kernel is the same or newer, you could use a tarball (and I've worked places where we did just that)! `git` was probably the tool that really sold everyone on: I want a goddamned cryptographic hash of everything in the thing, otherwise I Don't Trust Like That. We don't accept mystery meat from our source code anymore, why we feel any differently about what actually runs is Stockholm's syndrome IMHO.