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Comment by sieabahlpark | Hacker News Reader

Have fun managing osx and Linux dependencies then when you could just maintain one.

That really hasn’t been an issue for me since Homebrew came out a decade ago - using Python, Rust, Node, Java, etc., all of which have mature stories for cross-platform development. The main area I’ve run into problems are legacy projects where it’s not “Linux” but more like “one old Linux distribution with a 32-but binary nobody can reproduce” and Docker is really the least troublesome part of those projects.

If you're not IT, god speed y'all, then it's not all that bad honestly. I set up my stuff with Ansible and 90% of the "porting" work was the mapping between rpms and brew packages.

The only headache I get sometimes is because I have the GNU utils first in the path which makes compilation scripts mad sometimes.

Indeed, one can maintain only a macOS application.

And also there is some additional fun dealing with broken or incompatible packages whenever you upgrade OSX

In the languages I work with (primarily JavaScript and Rust), cross-platform compatibility tends to be pretty much a non-issue. I develop on macOS, deploy on Linux, and it Just Works. No extra work required.

You forget to mention all backend services (db, redis etc are managed and you need internet connection and cloud credentials for even a development workflow.

I certainly do not use backend services that need to be hosted (if I can at all help it, which I usually can). Open source databases like Postgres and Redis are easy to install on macOS with homebrew. You can even have multiple versions install simultaneously, although I've found that Postgres tends to be backwards compatible enough that I just run everything on the latest version.

When I used to use a mac I just put all my "Linux" (GNU really) dependencies in a prefix and that worked pretty well. Docker is kind of overkill for what people use it for IMO.

I used to be on the side of relying on native tools/libs, and managing them in a similar way to what you to describe, but it all became too much to handle, with dependencies across projects breaking with regularity.

Maybe I wasn't doing it right, but switching to Docker to sequester my projects and their dependencies has saved me so much time and hassle, especially with the amount of repos I work on throughout the year.

My biggest weakness today is that I still don't reach for Docker right away when starting work on a new project or when evaluating a new tool. Old habits…

My point was that you can do this without docker. On Linux you can use separate chroots for each project, on OSX you could probably do that too but since prebuilt tools for generating a darwin rootfs are rarer prefixes are easier.

I knows it’s becoming a bit of a meme now that modern software development is just rediscovering approaches from the 70s…

but it has really hit me recently how so many “indispensable” projects are just something that’s existed for decades re-written at a higher abstraction-level with a nicer UX.

I wish I had more classic Unix sysadmin experience. But unfortunately the gains are real, and I can’t justify investing time into learning the older tech (let’s say, using chroot instead of docker), when the newer is so much faster to learn, and has (comparative to modern hardware) such small overhead (if you’re not on MacOS :P)

I am excited about the rust-rewrite movement for shell though - precisely because it’s a chance to bring all the ux lessons we’ve learned in the last decades to cli-tools.

Stuff like charm.sh is super exciting.

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