Comment by liquid_thyme
7 hours ago
Speaking of portability, As a developer who has shipped software on Windows for over a decade, and then some on Linux. Targeting Windows is insanely easy, because of the ABI. You compile once and you have an extremely high chance that it just works on every Windows version. Not perfect, but better than any other platform ever made. Heck I've used software from CDROMS where the binary was compiled 20 years ago and it still works today without any modification.
With Linux, you have to target specific distros, do something insane like a giant bundle of everything, or static linking or some other craziness, or open up your source code and let someone else take the headache. Oh and I almost forgot.. install scripts that detect distros, install dependencies. And god help you if you need to ship a kernel module.
>The ecosystem was not won on technical merit. OEM per-processor licensing, embrace-extend-extinguish against Java and the web, document format lock-in, and a long pattern of obstructing standardization attempts that would constrain Windows (PWI in 1994, ECMA-234 in 1995, OpenDocument later) while pushing their own through when it extended reach.
Windows has broad hardware compatibility, a stable enough application platform (see above), aggressive backward compatibility, a large developer ecosystem, and distribution through OEMs. Those are technical merits, even if they are not the only merits.
>do something insane like a giant bundle of everything, or static linking
But isn't this exactly what shipping on Windows looks like? I've just checked my Windows partition and there are 43 instances of sqlite dll and 16 instances of Qt5Core.dll because every program that uses those libs needs to include them in their "giant bundle of everything".
>I've just checked my Windows partition and there are 43 instances of sqlite dll and 16 instances of Qt5Core.dll because every program that uses those libs needs to include them in their "giant bundle of everything".
Oouch, I just got temporary headache just trying to read and comprehend the Windows mess that you mentioned here.
Now count up the .NET runtime dlls too!
For every version between 3.5 and 10.
> With Linux, you have to target specific distros, do something insane like a giant bundle of everything,
This is what you do for Flatpack, Steam, or Docker. All these are popular options.
> Oh and I almost forgot.. install scripts that detect distros, install dependencies.
Most distros offer tooling to make packages for their package managers. With them you declare the dependencies you want and the package manager does the rest.
> And god help you if you need to ship a kernel module.
The right way to do it is to open source it and let the installer compile the software against the kernel headers. Sysdig and VirtualBox do that.
You can also simply use Flatpak with the Freedesktop Runtime. It runs everywhere regardless of the distribution. For games Steam offers something similar with the Steam Runtimes. You simply develop for that one container and the software will still be running in 20 years. Even though, of course, making software proprietary isn’t best practice. If you make everything open source from the start the various Linux distributions and users can adapt it themselves for their distribution and eventually modernize it as well.
From the flatpak docs:
> A given branch of the Freedesktop runtime has a 2 year support period after which they are declared EOL.
EOL doesn't mean you can't install or use it anymore. It simply means you shouldn't use it anymore because security updates are no longer available. You face the same problem with Windows software that is no longer updated. The only difference is that no one tells you it's no longer supported.
The Linux (and BSD) ecosystems are not geared for shipping binary-only software. Everything is designed for distributions to package software _from source_, so there's no stable ABI.