Nix is effectively transforming dynamic binaries to static ones. Might as well skip the step, stop pretending that drive space is expensive, and link everything statically.

No. The Nix approach lets you retain the reuse, and it can be extended to allow for uniform security patching as well (which has been done already in the Guix project).

And if you really want a single redistributable binary, any existing package can easily be bundled into one without decompiling it.

Traditional static linking is strictly worse.

Huh, never heard it put this way. I guess it's true though.

Anyone disagree?

What about completely optional dependencies which might get loaded at runtime based on some dynamic criteria? Dynamic libs are not primarily for space saving. Also, there are thousands of other packaging problems not solved by static binaries, so yes, I do disagree with grandparent commenter :D

Farid Zakaria recently gave a talk¹ (at NixCon 2022) where I think he put it better: Nix (and Guix) blur the line between dynamic and static linking.

I think this is true, because with Nix and Guix, you actually have an end result with the positive characteristics of both kinds of linking.

His talk, based on his work on shrinkwrap² and nix-harden-needed², called for the creation of a new executable format for the Nix world. Seems apropos as a reminder that there are other possibilities!

(I think these kinds of solutions are definitely within reach for Valve from a technical perspective. Other tools are using them today.)

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1a: https://youtu.be/HZKFe4mCkr4

1b: https://youtu.be/lzk4sldexX4

2: https://fzakaria.com/2022/03/15/shrinkwrap-taming-dynamic-sh...

3: https://fzakaria.com/2022/09/12/making-runpath-redundant-for...

Conceptually that's kind of true, if you only consider the end result for a given binary, (since it would load only shared libs as if they were statically linked).

But multiple derivations can share dependencies, which does save space and also makes it easy to identify dependencies of a given derivation, where statically linking would make that opaque.

Also, the story goes way beyond binaries, as dependencies often carry additional resources not bundled into the binary.

RAM is still expensive…