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Comment by mardifoufs | Hacker News Reader

DLL hell hasn't been a thing for more than a decade at this point though, so maybe it did. I genuinely never encounter any issues with DLLs anymore.

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Most Windows apps ship with copies of all their dependencies. The DLL Hell problem was solved by disk and bandwidth getting cheaper to the point where many dozens or even hundreds of copies of MSCVRT.DLL and friends on your system pass unnoticed.

But isn't that a good thing? I don't mind having more DLLs if stuff just works. It avoids the similar, though harder to solve issues on Linux. I'd rather be able to have a copy of the MSCVRT.DLL than to have to pray that my system has the right glibc to be honest.

But maybe I'm not understanding the trade offs correctly.

> I don't mind having more DLLs if stuff just works.

The counterpart is when a remotely exploitable security issue is found in that DLL, as has happened with zlib in the past and log4j more recently; then you have to chase down and update every single copy of that DLL.

If you absolutely need a way to install dependencies globally such that they can be shared between apps, you can still do that without version conflicts if you write proper manifests for them and use https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Side-by-side_assembly.

But it's easier to just package a local copy and not worry about any of this, so that's what people mostly do now.

The cost of storage space these days is about $0.01 per 100 megabytes.

An awful lot of it went away in my experience in the c++11 world when everyone all Of a sudden wanted to upgrade. Then another time in 2015 when MSVC decided their standard library would be backwards compatible

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