Got an old Raspberry Pi spare? Try RISC OS. It is, something else

Re:Got an old Raspberry Pi spare? Try RISC OS. It is, someth... by dusted on Friday May 03, 2024 @09:43AM (#40247579)

Unpopular take but here I go (bye bye karma): Code sharing between applications, beyond what is basic, common and stable enough that it could live in the kernel, is not a good idea in the long run. It served a purpose back when memory was scarce and libraries (and their versions) few.

Containerization for all it's isolation magic has primarily been successful as a way to package "more or less the entire OS dependency" because sharing code is hard. How many containers ship with only one single binary (the active data set) ? None, code sharing is the primary problem that containers solve.

Static linking solves it better. RiscOS approach actually solves it better, too.

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Re:Got an old Raspberry Pi spare? Try RISC OS. It is, someth... by RetroTechie on Friday May 03, 2024 @11:23AM (#40248734)

Code sharing should not be done, because it is a hard problem?

Stuffing whole OSes + apps + their dependencies in containers, and running a # of those, is not the solution. That works for single-purpose uses like servers. Not for user-facing OSes that run a # of apps side-by-side.

Solving that "how to share code reliably" problem is the solution. Being a hard problem means it's worthwhile to find a good solution for it.

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Re:Got an old Raspberry Pi spare? Try RISC OS. It is, someth... by dusted on Saturday May 04, 2024 @07:25PM (#40261112)

Sharing code runtime is not a hard problem, it's the wrong problem. Code _sharing_ shouldn't be done. Code _reuse_ sure, absolutely, and it's done right by including that exact, specific code at compile time.

And yes, stuffing whole OSes + apps + deps into containers is indeed not the solution, it's the symptom.

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