Without dlopen (with regular dynamic linking), it's much harder to compile for older distros, and I doubt you can easily implement glibc/musl cross-compatibility at all in general.
Take a look what Valve does in a Steam Runtime:
- https://gitlab.steamos.cloud/steamrt/steam-runtime-tools/-/blob/main/docs/pressure-vessel.md
- https://gitlab.steamos.cloud/steamrt/steam-runtime-tools/-/blob/main/subprojects/libcapsule/doc/Capsules.txtBut Musl is only available on Linux, isn't it? Cosmopolitan (https://github.com/jart/cosmopolitan) goes further and is available also on Mac and Windows, and it uses e.g. SIMD and other performance related improvements. Unfortunately, one has to cut through the marketing "magic" to find the main engineering value; stripping away the "polyglot" shell-script hacks and the "Actually Portable Executable" container (which are undoubtedly innovative), the core benefit proposition of Cosmopolitan is indeed a platform-agnostic, statically-linked C standard (plus some Posix) library that performs runtime system call translation, so to say "the Musl we have been waiting for".
I don't want Lua. Using Lua is crazy clever, but it's not what I want.
I should just vibe code the dang thing.
The things I know of and can think of off the top of my head are:
1. appimage https://appimage.org/
2. nix-bundle https://github.com/nix-community/nix-bundle
3. guix via guix pack
4. A small collection of random small projects hardly anyone uses for docker to do this (i.e. https://github.com/NilsIrl/dockerc )
5. A docker image (a package that runs everywhere, assuming a docker runtime is available)
7. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snap_(software)
AppImage is the closest to what you want I think.
A "works in most cases" build should also be available for that that it would benefit. And if you can, why not provide specialized packages for the edge cases?
Of course, don't take my advice as-is, you should always thoroughly benchmark your software on real systems and choose the tradeoffs you're willing to make.
Been doing it this way for years now, so it's well battle tested.
I wonder though, if I package say a .so file from nVidia, is that allowed by the license?
You generally still also have to abide by license obligations for OSS too, e. G., GPL.
To be specific for the exampls, Nvidia has historically been quite restrictive (only on approval) here. Firmware has only recently been opened up a bit and drivers continue to be an issue iirc.
It makes me wonder, does the OS still take its job of hardware abstraction seriously these days?
It works surprisingly well but their pricing is hidden and last time I contacted them as a student it was upwards of $350/year
But you can't take .so files and make one "static" binary out of them.
Yes you can!
This is more-or-less what unexec does
- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21394916
For some reason nobody seems to like this sorcery, probably because it combines the worst of all worlds.
But there's almost[1] nothing special about what the dynamic linker is doing to get those .so files into memory that it can't arrange them in one big file ahead of time!
[1]: ASLR would be one of those things...
But I'm always a bit sceptical about such approaches. They are not universal. You still need glibc/musl to be the same on the target system. Also, if you compile againt new glibc version, but try to run on old glibc version, it might not work.
These are just strange and confusing from the end users' perspective.
You can change the rpath though, which is sort of like an LD_LIBRARY_PATH baked into the object, which makes it relatively easy to bundle everything but libc with your binary.
edit: Mild correction, there is this: https://sourceforge.net/projects/statifier/ But the way this works is that it has the dynamic linker load everything (without ASLR / in a compact layout, presumably) and then dumps an image of the process. Everything else is just increasingly fancy ways of copying shared objects around and making ld.so prefer the bundled libraries.
https://appimage.github.io/appimagetool/
Myself, I've committed to using Lua for all my cross-platform development needs, and in that regard I find luastatic very, very useful ..
made hooking into game code much easier than before
Even worse is containers, which has the disadvantage of both.
In practice, a statically linked system is often smaller than a meticulously dynamically linked one - while there are many copies of common routines, programs only contain tightly packed, specifically optimized and sometimes inlined versions of the symbols they use. The space and performance gain per program is quite significant.
Modern apps and containers are another issue entirely - linking doesn't help if your issue is gigabytes of graphical assets or using a container base image that includes the entire world.
When dynamically linking against shared OS libraries, Updates are far quicker and easier.
And as for the size advantage, just look at a typical Golang or Haskell program. Statically linked, two-digit megabytes, larger than my libc...
In the most security-forward roles I've worked in, the vast, vast majority of vulnerabilities identified in static binaries, Docker images, Flatpaks, Snaps, and VM appliance images fell into these categories:
1. The vendor of a given piece of software based their container image on an outdated version of e.g. Debian, and the vulnerabilities were coming from that, not the software I cared about. This seems like it supports your point, but consider: the overwhelming majority of these required a distro upgrade, rather than a point dependency upgrade of e.g. libcurl or whatnot, to patch the vulnerabilities. Countless times, I took a normal long-lived Debian test VM and tried to upgrade it to the patched version and then install whatever piece of software I was running in a docker image, and had the upgrade fail in some way (everything from the less-common "doesn't boot" to the very-common "software I wanted didn't have a distribution on its website for the very latest Debian yet, so I was back to hand-building it with all of the dependencies and accumulated cruft that entails").
2. Vulnerabilities that were unpatched or barely patched upstream (as in: a patch had merged but hadn't been baked into released artifacts yet--this applied equally to vulns in things I used directly, and vulns in their underlying OSes).
3. Massive quantities of vulnerabilities reported in "static" languages' standard libraries. Golang is particularly bad here, both because they habitually over-weight the severity of their CVEs and because most of the stdlib is packaged with each Golang binary (at least as far as SBOM scanners are concerned).
That puts me somewhat between a rock and a hard place. A dynamic-link-everything world with e.g. a "libgolang" versioned separately from apps would address the 3rd item in that list, but would make the 1st item worse. "Updates are far quicker and easier" is something of a fantasy in the realm of mainstream Linux distros (or copies of the userlands of those distros packaged into container images); it's certainly easier to mechanically perform an update of dependency components of a distro, but whether or not it actually works is another question.
And I'm not coming at this from a pro-container-all-the-things background. I was a Linux sysadmin long before all this stuff got popular, and it used to be a little easier to do patch cycles and point updates before container/immutable-image-of-userland systems established the convention of depending on extremely specific characteristics of a specific revision of a distro. But it was never truly easy, and isn't easy today.
No idea why the glibc can't provide API+ABI stability, but on Linux it always comes down to glibc related "DLL hell" problems (e.g. not being able to run an executable that was created on a more recent Linux system on an older Linux system even when the program doesn't access any new glibc entry points - the usually adviced solution is to link with an older glibc version, but that's also not trivial, unless you use the Zig toolchain).
TL;DR: It's not static vs dynamic linking, just glibc being a an exceptionally shitty solution as operating system interface.
if you configure binfmt_misc
>Windows
if you disable Windows Defender
>OpenBSD
only older versions
For most cases, a single Windows exe that targets the oldest version you want to support plus a single Glibc binary that dynamically links against the oldest version you want to support and so on is still the best option.
Gave up them afterwards. If I need to tweak dependencies might as well deal with the packet manager of my distro.
If you forego the requirement of a runtime plugin system, is there anything realistically preventing greenfield projects from just being fully statically linked, assuming their dependencies dont rely on dlopen ?
E.g. in my experience: command line tools are fine to link statically with MUSL, but as soon as you need a window and 3D rendering it's not worth the hassle.
Here is an idea, lets go back to pure UNIX distros using static binaries with OS IPC for any kind of application dynamism, I bet it will work out great, after all it did for several years.
Got to put that RAM to use.
Even with multiple processes sharing the same DLL I would be surprised if the alternative of those processes only containing the code they actually need would increase RAM usage dramatically, especially since most processes that run in the background on a typical Linux system wouldn't event even need to go through glibc but could talk directly to the syscall interface.
DLLs are fine as operating system interface as long as they are stable (e.g. Windows does it right, glibc doesn't). But apart from operating system interfaces and plugins, overusing dynamic linking just doesn't make a lot of sense (like on most Linux systems with their package managers).
We started there in computing history, and outside Linux where this desire to go to the past prevails, moved on to better ways including on other UNIX systems.
Adobe stuff is of the kind that you'd prefer to not exist at all rather than have it fixed (and today you largely can pretend that it never existed already), and the situation for games has been pretty much fixed by Steam runtimes.
It's fine that some people care about it and some solutions are really clever, but it just doesn't seem to be an actual issue you stumble on in practice much.
Basically the way for the year of the Linux desktop is to become Windows.
Binary compatibility solutions mostly target cases where rebuilding isn't possible, typically closed source software. Freezing and bundling software dependencies ultimately creates dependency hell rather than avoiding it.
Look at the hoops you sometimes have to jump through or hacks you have to apply to make something work on Nix, just because there is no standardization or build processes assume library locations etc. And if you then raise an issue with the software maintainer - the response is often "but we don't support Nix". And if they're not Nix/Nixos users, can you blame them?
If you've ever had to compile a modern/recent software package for an old distro (I've had to do this for old RH distro's on servers which due to regulations could not be upgraded) - you're in a world of pain. And both distro and software maintainers will say "not my problem, we don't support this" - and I fully understand their stance on that, because it is far from straight forward, and only serves a limited audience.