These companies have deep-pockets of capital to spend on such luxuries as individual contributors who can make it their jobs to deep-dive into single, esoteric, poorly specified tools. I do not.
Late September last year, Twitter laid off 336 people. In 15 years, I've never worked in a company that had more than even 150. A company the size of Google could probably hire and fire more people in a single year than I've ever been in professional contact. I cannot.
So how they operate, from soup to nuts, probably has zero bearing on how I should operate.
This unblocks continuous deployment at the final step, so latency from idea to production falls from years/months/weeks to hours. Or minutes.
Docker's had an interesting life: they built a PaaS, discarded the PaaS, now they're building a PaaS. Because that's what most developers actually need for their daily lives.
It turns out that tinkering with V8s is a lot of fun for a lot of people, but most drivers just want to know how to turn on the car and have the same basic interface work for any workload: wheel, accelerator, brake.
Disclaimer: I work for Pivotal, which is the majority donor of engineering effort to Cloud Foundry, a PaaS inspired in part by Google's experiences.
Unless you only are referring to only the Go compiler, can you provide a cite for this statement?
I also use static linking as much as I can. Sometimes it requires quite a bit of work due to how open source developers structure their build systems. I wonder if some folks at Google have also spent significant amounts of time unravelling idiosyncratic build systems found in open source projects to make static, portable binaries.
I often see commenters on HN and elsewhere making commments against static linking. It would be useful to be able to cite to Google's internal practices; these commenters also seem to attribute superior knowhow to Google staff.
Google released a bunch of their main build system recently, so you can see various hints about their internal practices there, starting with the documentation: http://bazel.io/docs/be/c-cpp.html#cc_binary.linkstatic The OSS bazel defaults to linkstatic=0, but I think internally they use linkstatic=1 there. "mostly static" mode.
That's just C/C++ of course, but a similar approach applies to Python, where there are zipped single-file executables that contain all of a python app's dependencies except for python itself and things like libc6. There's a primitive form of that in bazel at https://github.com/bazelbuild/bazel/blob/master/tools/build_.... Twitter's "Pants" build system is ideologically descended from Bazel, and along with it came the Pex python executable format: https://github.com/pantsbuild/pex
Just the fact that Go does mostly-static linking by default is a decent hint in this direction, considering where Go originated.
In the end, neither approach is ideal for all scenarios. General purpose linux distributions have various very good reasons to prefer dynamic linking wherever possible. Cluster operators and anybody distributing binaries for multiple environments have lots of reasons to prefer static linking. It's not a decision to be made in a vacuum.
1. Build them all at current revision and package them as a subtree. This is utterly pointless since due to containerization there will be no library sharing anyway. The only real reason you might want to do this is to save time on static linking.
2. Link statically and ship a single (often enormous) binary with just the stuff you need, saving a bit of disk space, and a bit of time at runtime. Fewer moving parts, what's not to like?
"Borg programs are statically linked to reduce dependencies on their runtime environment, and structured as packages of binaries and data files"
As you can see, most parts of this picture map nearly exactly to how Kubernetes/Docker are supposed to be used. Used in this way to manage large deployments, containers provide an unbeatable value proposition.