Comment by Spivak
3 years ago
We're not disagreeing. You can, of course, use other libc's on Linux the kernel, but you cannot use other libc's on GNU/Linux the distro that uses glibc without some things not working. This can be fine on your own systems so long as you're aware of the tradeoffs but if you're distributing your software for use on other people's systems your users will be annoyed with you.
Even Go parses /etc/nsswitch.conf and farms out to cgo when it finds a module it can't handle. This technically doesn't work because there's no guarantee that the hosts or dns entries in nsswitch have consistent behavior, it's just the name of a library you're supposed to dlopen. On evil, but valid, distro resolv.conf points to 0.0.0.0 and hosts module reads an sqlite file.
> you cannot use other libc's on GNU/Linux the distro that uses glibc without some things not working
As the comment your replying to points out, you can statically link your libc requirements and work on any Linux distro under the sun.
You can also LD_PRELOAD any library you need, and also work on any Linux distro under the sun. This is effectively how games work on Windows too, they ship all their own libraries. Steam installs a specific copy of the VCREDIST any given game needs when you install the game.
If you are not releasing source code, it's unreasonable to think the ABIs you require will just be present on any random computer. Ship the code you need, it's not hard.