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> at a quadratic rate

wat?

Worst case is linear. Every program duplicates everything it needs. Which honestly is just totally fine.

How is this quadratic?

Quadratic in the sense that, in the worst case, you have N programs sharing the same set of M dependencies, requiring N*M components worth of space. With sharing, it would only be N+M.

Ah yeah. Feels like you could argue either way!

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!

FS deduplication solves the problem at the storage level, but not at the transfer level. The components would still be downloaded multiple times if the downloader doesn't have a way to know what has already been downloaded.

Docker's way of doing things is basically an admittance of defeat by lazy engineers. We can do better than that.

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