alt Hacker NewsYes and no.
Yes, in that it's primarily a linux thing as MS has gone the route of saving off basically all dlls for all their OSes for backwards compatibility (though they still backpatch).
No, in that other than Rust and Go (and maybe a few others that emit single binaries, zig?) this is how it works with OS distributed programming language packages. Python, ruby, java, perl, C#, the OS will for all of them control distribute and update the libs independent of the apps that use them.
Also, C/C++ still make up a huge percentage of all apps in pretty much any OS.
Replies
> No, in that other than Rust and Go (and maybe a few others that emit single binaries, zig?) this is how it works with OS distributed programming language packages.
Uhmm... No? E.g.:
- Python has long strongly recommended virtual environments.
- Not to talk about JavaScript which of course manage things per project by default.
- I don't remember what was the state of things in .NET Framework, but in modern .NET NuGet packages are distributed as DLLs with your app.
I don't know other ecosystems well but I believe they aren't different.
> prerequisite for distributing libraries as anything other than source code.
> Python, ruby, java, perl, C#, the OS will for all of them control distribute and update the libs independent of the apps that use them.
Those are all JIT'ed languages, so they're distributed in source or intermediate form, not as fixed-ABI-shared-libraries.
It's really just C where shared libs really work. Even C++ has wrinkles.