Programs including their dependencies.
The Linux model of global shared libraries is an abject failure. It’s a failed model — and the prevalence of requiring Docker simply to launch a program is evidence of this.
Windows doesn’t have global library folders that are polluted by a million user scripts. And you can reliably launch software that’s 25 years old. It works great. Linux’s model was a nice effort but ultimately a failure.
C:\WINDOWS\SYSTEM32
It's called "DLL Hell" for a reason. It used to be very common for every program you installed to dump several libraries in that directory. It included program-specific libraries (so that directory would have a mix of internal libraries for every program you ever installed; pray there were no naming conflicts!), compiler runtime libraries like the C library (and it was not uncommon for a program to overwrite an already existing runtime DLL with an older version, breaking other programs which expected the newer version), and sometimes even operating system libraries. It got so bad that IIRC Microsoft made Windows automatically detect when an important operating system DLL had been overwritten, and restore it from a secret copy of the original DLL it had stashed elsewhere.
Maybe back on Windows 95? Hasn’t been the case or an issue in as long as I can remember.
> It's called "DLL Hell" for a reason.
Linux shared library hell is at least a full order of magnitude more complex, fragile, and error prone. Launching a Linux program is so outrageously unreliable that everyone uses Docker just to run a bloody program! It’s so so bad. At least in the year two thousand and twenty four.
wat?
Worst case is linear. Every program duplicates everything it needs. Which honestly is just totally fine.
How is this quadratic?
In any case I don’t think library duplication is a meaningful issue in most cases. As evidenced by everyone using Docker which duplicates libraries!
Feels like this could be totally solved at the filesystem level with copy-on-write de-duplication. The best of both worlds!
Docker's way of doing things is basically an admittance of defeat by lazy engineers. We can do better than that.