Its rarely as easy as sharing a requirements.txt. There are lots of things that can still break - for examples you get weird situations where different modules require different versions of a third module. Or all the Cuda toolkit version issues thsy seem to come up with gpu stuff. When we share python, we tend to share a docker image, and even this isn't foolproof. A big problem I think is that it doesn't incentivize building something portable. And it's very hard to test across different machines. Add to that all the different practices re virtual environments, venv, conda, etc, everyone tries to install the dependencies differently or is starting from some nonstandard state. It's a mess.

Maybe using Nix it's a better experience for creating such an environment where you depending also on system utilities.

Everyone is using llama.cpp because we reject the idea of giving up on system libraries like nix does. That kind of tomfoolery (at least in the desktop context) is only required when you use software projects that use libraries/languages which break forwards compatibility every 3 years.

If you just write straight c++ (without c++xx, or anything like it) you can compile the code on machines from decades ago if you want.

Docker. Don't forget Docker. I pretty much checked out the day using it became a requirement just to talk to a GPU and didn't do much with machine learning until llama.cpp came along.

What's c++xx?

C++11, and greater.

Huh, I was proficient in Rust before "properly" learning C++, so maybe that accounts for it, but I didn't realize C++11 was controversial. Is it just move semantics, or are there some library things that are hard to implement?

I think what OP is saying is that decades-old systems wouldn't have C++11-compatible compilers on them.

And maybe that "C++" is now basically a bunch of different incompatible languages instead of just 1 language, depending on what "xx" is (11, 14, 17, 20, 23, etc).

It's like Python 2 vs Python 3 except even worse.

In my experience, C++03 code works just fine without changes on a C++11 and C++14 compilers, so no, it's not at all like Python 2/3. The few features that were ripped out were exactly the stuff that pretty much no-one was using for good reasons (e.g. throw-specifications).

> No idea what a Google Collab is

It's ~equivalent to a Jupyter notebook.