> But none of that stuff is magic.
I never said it was, I simply said that docker does more than statically link binaries.
>You could just run a VM on macos or windows directly, statically link your Linux binaries and ship them with scp or curl.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224
> The killer feature of docker is that it makes anything into a statically linked executable.
The killer feature of docker is it gives you an immutable*, versionable environment that handles more than just scp'ing binaries.
The benefit docker provides here is giving users a simple, reproducible, downloadable environment with no external dependencies.
I'm not saying Docker is useless in the current build environment. On the contrary - Having a convenient way to sandbox, ship and execute arbitrary execution environments and statically linked executables is really useful.
I think this is such a great idea we should make debian work closer to this model. Nix is a fantastic step in this direction and it'd be great if more distributions followed suit.
Debian and friends fill your hard drive with of weird, non-reproducible versions of various dynamically linked libraries. The fact I can't take a binary on my x86_64 linux machine and run it on your x86_64 linux machine is an embarrassment. Moving toward static linking and fully reproducible builds would be a tremendous help here.
Docker feels like a kludgy hack. I'd love a world where docker isn't necessary because its best ideas have been lowered into the OS itself.
The nice thing about fully statically linked executables can just be copied between machines and ran. If Java worked this way, the compiler would produce a (large) binary file with no runtime dependancies, and you could just copy that between computers.
Rust and Go don’t give you a choice - they only have this mode of compilation.
Docker forces all software to work this way by hiding the host OS’s filesystem from the program. It also provides an easy to use distribution system for downloading executables. And it ships with a Linux VM on windows and macos.
But none of that stuff is magic. You could just run a VM on macos or windows directly, statically link your Linux binaries and ship them with scp or curl.
The killer feature of docker is that it makes anything into a statically linked executable. You can just do that with most compilers directly.