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A comment on Bzip2 crate switches from C to 100% rust. Parent comment

Re:Bzip2 crate switches from C to 100% rust by IshKebab on Wednesday June 18, 2025 @08:42AM (#44309387)
Kind of off-topic. But yeah it's a good idea for operating systems to guarantee the provision of very commonly used libraries (libc for example) so that they can be shared.

Mac does this, and Windows pretty much does it too. There was an attempt to do this on Linux with the Linux Standard Base, but it never really worked and they gave up years ago. So on Linux if you want a truly portable application you can pretty much only rely on the system providing very old versions of glibc.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Bzip2 crate switches from C to 100% rust by guappa on Wednesday June 18, 2025 @03:00PM (#44312420)
The standard library is the whole distro :)

It's hardly a fair comparison with old linux distros when osx certainly will not run anything old… remember they dropped rosetta, rosetta2, 32bit support, opengl… (list continues).

And I don't think you can expect windows xp to run binaries for windows 11 either.

So I don't understand why you think this is perfectly reasonable to expect on linux, when no other OS has ever supported it.

Care to explain?

[ Parent | on HN ]