Comment by nyarlathotep_
2 days ago
> It's only considered a bad idea because git handles it poorly. You're already putting all your code in version control - why would you not include the compiler binaries and system libraries too? Now everybody that gets the code has the right compiler to build it with as well!
No arguments here, it makes perfect sense to me as a practice. It's shortsighted to consider only "libraries" (as source, typically) to be "dependencies"--implicitly you're relying on a compatible compiler version/runtime/interpreter (and whatever those depend on) and etc
What was the nature of this project? Was this something related to game development?
That seems to be the only domain where this approach is used (from what I've heard).
Yes, this was a video game, targeting games consoles - so the executable statically links with pretty much everything, including stuff that would count as part of the OS on a PC. And then, if you can make sure everybody builds with the same libraries then you can be sure that everybody is running the same code. (I imagine this approach is also used for embedded development sometimes, another case where the build artefacts cover a much larger percentage of what gets run on the target than is the case with a PC.)
I will admit that even though I think it might be worth doing (and not doing it because your version control system doesn't make it easy is the worst reason for not doing it!), I'm not sure I'd consider it absolutely mandatory, certainly not for video games anyway. Most projects I've worked on haven't done this, and it's been fine, especially if you have a CI system doing the builds - and now the individual developers' systems just have to be roughly right. But it is nice to have, if you've got the right combination of personpower and institutional will to actually do it. It eliminates a whole category of possible issues straight away.
(I'd like to think that for safety critical stuff like medical or automotive this sort of approach, but done even more carefully, would be par for the course...!)
This is really cool, thanks for the info. I've always wondered about how this was done, especially for games.
> so the executable statically links with pretty much everything, including stuff that would count as part of the OS on a PC.
So this is something like whatever libc implementation was used? What era was this? "modern" ish consoles (ps4/XBox-whatever-from-the-last-decade)?