3 ms·

Another decade or two and perhaps the Unix community will finally reinvent the .exe or .app

coderenegade 3y ago
It's more than just creating a distributable, though. It's also a dev fixed environment and a cross-compiler when paired with qemu, and a test suite all rolled into one. It's hugely powerful for how simple it is.
paulddraper 3y ago
That's just.......wrong. MacOS makes static linking quite difficult. And Windows is infamous for "DLL Hell."
- pjmlp 3y ago
  Windows 9X/2000/NT was long time ago, nowadays that it more a GNU/Linux problem than Windows one.
nerdponx 3y ago
It's more like chroot, with a special namespace for processes.
hughesjj 3y ago
They did, many times. they're called flatpaks/snaps/self executing zip files. Even windows reinvented the exe with msi's, and python has dists and wheels, and *nix/bsd has jails and vms have existed forever, and java has the jvm with jars and previously, applets. Of course, none of those are actually as user friendly nor cross platform compatible as docker. Heck even docker isn't perfect and will leak abstractions once you start hitting syscalls (network, filesystem, etc), or if you're like 99.9...% of developers who don't host their own artifactory and cryptographically tag every step in their dockerfile Show me an .exe that can self deploy an elk stack across windows, Darwin, and Linux with minimal system environment issues
- KronisLV 3y ago
  > They did, many times. they're called flatpaks/snaps/self executing zip files. Honestly, getting some desktop software in the form of one of those is wonderfully refreshing. Just take an AppImage file or whatever, make it executable and run it. Sometimes you don't care about the benefits of shared libraries and want something to just run regardless of what's going on with your distro, for which these technologies are great. Ideally, in addition to the proper package manager approach for those that value different things at different times. But for shipping things like WebApps, OCI containers and Docker/Podman is amazing.
  - hughesjj 3y ago
    I was a huge fan of portable apps back in the day. Plug in a usb stick, and boom, I could use firefox on my school computer instead of ie6

It's more than just creating a distributable, though. It's also a dev fixed environment and a cross-compiler when paired with qemu, and a test suite all rolled into one. It's hugely powerful for how simple it is.

paulddraper 3y ago

That's just.......wrong. MacOS makes static linking quite difficult. And Windows is infamous for "DLL Hell."

pjmlp 3y ago
Windows 9X/2000/NT was long time ago, nowadays that it more a GNU/Linux problem than Windows one.

nerdponx 3y ago

It's more like chroot, with a special namespace for processes.

hughesjj 3y ago

They did, many times. they're called flatpaks/snaps/self executing zip files. Even windows reinvented the exe with msi's, and python has dists and wheels, and *nix/bsd has jails and vms have existed forever, and java has the jvm with jars and previously, applets. Of course, none of those are actually as user friendly nor cross platform compatible as docker. Heck even docker isn't perfect and will leak abstractions once you start hitting syscalls (network, filesystem, etc), or if you're like 99.9...% of developers who don't host their own artifactory and cryptographically tag every step in their dockerfile Show me an .exe that can self deploy an elk stack across windows, Darwin, and Linux with minimal system environment issues

KronisLV 3y ago
> They did, many times. they're called flatpaks/snaps/self executing zip files. Honestly, getting some desktop software in the form of one of those is wonderfully refreshing. Just take an AppImage file or whatever, make it executable and run it. Sometimes you don't care about the benefits of shared libraries and want something to just run regardless of what's going on with your distro, for which these technologies are great. Ideally, in addition to the proper package manager approach for those that value different things at different times. But for shipping things like WebApps, OCI containers and Docker/Podman is amazing.
- hughesjj 3y ago
  I was a huge fan of portable apps back in the day. Plug in a usb stick, and boom, I could use firefox on my school computer instead of ie6