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Comment by shwouchk | Hacker News Reader

sdf.org is the one. it’s a shared computing environment with thousands of users, mostly volunteer and donation based.

GP is stating that on such a system, static executables are expensive (and chrome is completely out of scope)

Sure but they can do that because they own most of the system. It's the same with e.g. Debian - all the binaries you get from the repo work with all the libraries you get from the repo because they're built as part of one big project. When a separate party wants to ship something that works on most Linux systems they have to minimize dependencies as much as possible. They don't get the luxury of being the same person who controls most of the rest of the system.

A Go binary can be scp'd as a single file to any server with the same processor architecture and just run. I've never encountered that in any other framework.

That's a conservatism that's accepted but rarely tested and that's my point. I don't think it actually is so unbearably hard to have a couple builds that cover 90% of userlands. And the remaining folk can go compile themselves, if your software is the good stuff (open source).

We've accepted this as a yes absolutely to try anything is folly excuse for decades. It was tired already and it's ridiculous today to just accept it as a hard stop wall.

The degree to which people have allowed laziness of scp anywhere to dominate reason and sense and improvement is gob smacking. Skill issue. There's more than just eternal convenience for this one extremely lazy use case at stake.

What if the software is not open source?

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