Hacker News Reader

Comment by charcircuit | Hacker News Reader

Doesn't docker seem overkill compared to just a package for a package manager or statically compiling Z3 into your binary?

View on HN

When you're running multiple projects expecting the same globally installed library or shell command (but a different version), building/running in docker is a breeze: each container can have its own set of dependency versions.

> globally installed library or shell command

There's your problem! Different versions of anything can coexist if they're installed to separate locations; e.g. Nix does this by using the `--prefix` option of each project's './configure' script.

Docker is just another solution to the problem.

It's a rather convoluted one though: rather than telling libraries to install in different places, they're installed "globally" within a chroot, which then gets tarred-up, which then gets untarred, then bind-mounted, then chrooted-into again.

A cross platform solution, which is nice.

It's not "cross-platform" at all, since Docker builds on Linux containers. For example, the Docker applications for Windows and macOS just run a Linux VM behind the scenes.

AFAIK you can't run Windows binaries using Docker, even if you're using Windows, since it's running in a Linux VM; likewise for macOS binaries on macOS, Solaris on Solaris, etc.

Docker on WSL2 kind-of runs on the host, though.

WSL1 as far as I understand works like wine, transpiling calls to NT. But isn't WSL2 just a VM?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com