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Comment by readams | Hacker News Reader

Static linking is independent of this concern. Go could implement dynamic linking but doesn't for ideological reasons.

I'd really hate to be a distribution maintainer in a world where go components are common. Security bug in the TLS library? Time to download 14GB of updates!

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Not ideological reasons. The latest version of Go supports dynamic linking for some platforms.

On Android there is no way around it, as native code can only be accessed via dynamic linking.

This is what some Go designers think of dynamic linking:

http://harmful.cat-v.org/software/dynamic-linking/

And those reasons are clear and clear-cut. Dynamic linking is a net negative in most use cases, and certainly in all the use-cases that the Go developers are developing for, where reproducible builds are mandatory, code size is a tiny fraction of main memory, and code quality is very strictly maintained. When you've built a good development and deploy strategy, rebuilding and redistributing your binary is an everyday activity. There's no additional cost.

Yeeesss... but ultimately, Go is also a pragmatic language.

Dynamic linking is coming to Go, like it or not; because it's a feature that is needed in certain circumstances, and that has been acknowledged, even by the Go team.

That same web page lists Linux as harmful.

http://harmful.cat-v.org/software/operating-systems/linux/

I'm happy to be an end user in a world where go components are becoming more common, because statically-linked executables are far less likely to break when I upgrade unrelated programs.

Just download the deltas instead?

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