As someone that have worked in software for 30 years, and deplying complicated software, shared libraries is a misstake. You think you get the benefit of size and easy security upgrades, but due to deployment hell you end up using docker and now your deployment actually added a whole OS in size and you need to do security upgrades for this OS instead of just your application.
I use rust for some software now, and I build it with musl, and is struck by how small things get in relation to the regular deployment, and it feels like magic that I no longer get glibc incompatibility issues.
Technically this is conflating two things: bundling dependencies and static/dynamic linking. But since you have to bundle your dependencies to use static linking, and there’s little point dynamic linking if you bundle your dependencies… most of the time they are synonymous.
Exceptions are things like plugins, but that’s pretty rare.
As someone that have worked in software for 30 years, and deplying complicated software, shared libraries is a misstake. You think you get the benefit of size and easy security upgrades, but due to deployment hell you end up using docker and now your deployment actually added a whole OS in size and you need to do security upgrades for this OS instead of just your application. I use rust for some software now, and I build it with musl, and is struck by how small things get in relation to the regular deployment, and it feels like magic that I no longer get glibc incompatibility issues.
Maybe tackle that deployment hell instead of band-aiding it with docker?
He is. By using statically linked binaries.
Technically this is conflating two things: bundling dependencies and static/dynamic linking. But since you have to bundle your dependencies to use static linking, and there’s little point dynamic linking if you bundle your dependencies… most of the time they are synonymous.
Exceptions are things like plugins, but that’s pretty rare.