Personally I weap for the death of shared libraries. It's great developer convenience to statically bundle everything, and ever so manageable...
But it makes me so sad thinking not just of the storage footprint of dozens of copies of the library floating around (be it v8 for deno, or chrome for electron), but the memory cost too of having that near-to duplicate library loaded multiple times too.
And then there's the maintenance cost to the user, of needing to update each package independently to get updates. With something like the web, I as a user would far prefer having bleeding edge shared libraries/v8's/browsers underfoot, and carry the expectation that each app can load & run atop this most recent version.
The trends have been very much in the other way. One of the main Go champions tout is it's static compilation, I think rust too. What are containers but entire static system images, as opposed to just having some static libraries? Part of me is willing to acknowledge that the larger footprints aren't that impactful, aren't really a problem, but it contravenes the deliberate & elegant simplicity that something like an OS distribution used to represent: I look at Debian as thousands of different pieces, all wonderfully integrated & interlinked, a cohesive system, that one ought to be able to bring additional projects onto to compile & extend. But our appetite for such has waned. The convenience for you & your users of just bundling everything you personally need to ship your stuff is quite high, at least when you're not updating dozens of oversized apps or running janky old versions because of this easy-to-get-started convenience.
But it makes me so sad thinking not just of the storage footprint of dozens of copies of the library floating around (be it v8 for deno, or chrome for electron), but the memory cost too of having that near-to duplicate library loaded multiple times too.
And then there's the maintenance cost to the user, of needing to update each package independently to get updates. With something like the web, I as a user would far prefer having bleeding edge shared libraries/v8's/browsers underfoot, and carry the expectation that each app can load & run atop this most recent version.
The trends have been very much in the other way. One of the main Go champions tout is it's static compilation, I think rust too. What are containers but entire static system images, as opposed to just having some static libraries? Part of me is willing to acknowledge that the larger footprints aren't that impactful, aren't really a problem, but it contravenes the deliberate & elegant simplicity that something like an OS distribution used to represent: I look at Debian as thousands of different pieces, all wonderfully integrated & interlinked, a cohesive system, that one ought to be able to bring additional projects onto to compile & extend. But our appetite for such has waned. The convenience for you & your users of just bundling everything you personally need to ship your stuff is quite high, at least when you're not updating dozens of oversized apps or running janky old versions because of this easy-to-get-started convenience.