Comment by galdor | Hacker News Reader

Comment by galdor | Hacker News Reader

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I'm unsatisfied with the current situation too, but it's a hard problem. You can either go full container (which means no BSD, and having to deal with Docker or Kubernetes and all the associated woes), or fallback to native packages which are a huge PITA to build, deploy and use.

I think that Nix and Guix have part of the solution: have a way to build fully independent packages that can be easily installed. But I'm not comfortable with the complexity of Nix, and Guix does not run on FreeBSD. And ultimately you still have to handle distribution and configuration of the base system you deploy on.

Innovation is possible, but there are a lot of expectations for any system dealing with building and deploying software. I feel that there are fundamental limitations inherited from the way UNIX OS work, and I wish we had lower level operating systems focused on executing services on multiple machines in a way similar to how mainframes work. One can dream.

I'm really growing tired of significant effort development effort going to dealing with deployment on the part of our stack that isn't written in Go. The Go side, deployment is replace binary, restart app, done. The Python and Javascript code we maintain takes significant effort to deploy, and builds can be brittle due to dependency issues.

> I feel that there are fundamental limitations inherited from the way UNIX OS work

There are, but the way go does deployments plays to Unix's strengths.

IMO if you're doing containers and cloud deployment then there's no point bothering with the OS layer. It'd be better to just build unikernels and deploy those directly. Some of the stripped down base images are going in this direction, and MirageOS looks pretty impressive although I've not been able to use it for real yet.

Just curious, what’s the benefit of using FreeBSD versus Debian/Ubuntu?

Not the person you replied to, but it tends to be more stable (commands and interfaces change less) and have better backwards compatibility; also ZFS is better-integrated than on Linux and better than any of the other options on Linux. (Jails used to be another advantage, but these days linux containers can more or less do most of the same things)

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