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Comment by kldx | Hacker News Reader

Typst is a single file binary. The preview packages are versioned too. If typst breaks the API in ten years, I'd still be able to download the old binary and make a PDF from scratch. I can't begin to imagine the complexity in installing multiple texlive distributions side by side.

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Yes, but its more complicated. In my case I have slides with a number of include files, some have not changed since 2006 (just checked), one does not want to maintain slides with same ancient version of typst, and then possibly have many floating around.

For me, they need to promise full backwards compatibility.

That's a valid point: if you don't want a language that makes breaking changes (so you can always compile old files with the latest version), it's not the right time to use typst. It's just moving too fast now. It's currently at version 0.11. Come back when they release 1.0.

That old binary won't link with the shared libraries on your machine 10 years from now. Depends on 280 other crates. Ye gads.

"Yeah just use ancient binaries" is not a viable strategy for future-proofing.

It's a lot easier to move fast and break things when you don't care about stability.

  $ ldd bin/typst
   statically linked

You faked this. `ldd` never prints just the text `statically linked` for a statically-linked binary.

Here's the real output.

    $ ldd result/bin/typst
        linux-vdso.so.1 (0x00007ffd2c4e5000)
        libgcc_s.so.1 => /nix/store/28d6zz06v3mpwdbi72fdw64qmmq8rhfm-gcc-13.2.0-lib/lib/libgcc_s.so.1 (0x00007f4fe68b9000)
        libm.so.6 => /nix/store/7x591g0d1kydp4dci0jvksi0qbn013v3-glibc-2.38-27/lib/libm.so.6 (0x00007f4fe67d9000)
        libc.so.6 => /nix/store/7x591g0d1kydp4dci0jvksi0qbn013v3-glibc-2.38-27/lib/libc.so.6 (0x00007f4fe4619000)
        /nix/store/7x591g0d1kydp4dci0jvksi0qbn013v3-glibc-2.38-27/lib/ld-linux-x86-64.so.2 => /nix/store/7v29y7b3b38x2hpgld698fw6k5mffam8-glibc-2.38-44/lib64/ld-linux-x86-64.so.2 (0x00007f4fe68e1000)

You can't have truly statically linked binaries on glibc systems; they ditched support for that over a decade ago. On the 1% of Linux systems using Musl you can produce statically-linked binaries, but `ldd` will report `not a dynamic executable`.

You faked your console output.

It's not faked. I guess the nix recipe does things differently from the official binary. Try yourself: https://github.com/typst/typst/releases/download/v0.11.0/typ...

But it's true that when I tried ldd on a trivial static binary (compiling "int main() { return 0; }" with "gcc -static a.c") I got a different message: "not a dynamic executable". I don't know why you'd get sometimes one message sometimes the other...

Having to use magically-blessed (what you call "official") binaries is not a viable strategy either.

If you don't know how to build a statically linked rust binary yourself, then why bother posting about the downsides of dynamic linking?

And obviously you can also link statically against musl on glibc systems. It's just another library.

Come on, it's a really good strategy if you care about this (use the official binary, or make the effort of making a static binary yourself).

And even your linked binary will probably work in 10 years, these libraries are not likely to break. See for example https://superuser.com/questions/1450027/how-exactly-a-system...

I couldn't say the same thing about the LaTeX binaries:

  $ ldd /usr/bin/pdflatex
 linux-vdso.so.1 (0x00007ffe347f7000)
 libpng16.so.16 => /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libpng16.so.16 (0x00007e699d5bf000)
 libz.so.1 => /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libz.so.1 (0x00007e699d5a3000)
 libkpathsea.so.6 => /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libkpathsea.so.6 (0x00007e699d587000)
 libstdc++.so.6 => /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libstdc++.so.6 (0x00007e699ce00000)
 libm.so.6 => /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libm.so.6 (0x00007e699d4a0000)
 libgcc_s.so.1 => /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libgcc_s.so.1 (0x00007e699d47e000)
 libc.so.6 => /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libc.so.6 (0x00007e699ca00000)
 /lib64/ld-linux-x86-64.so.2 (0x00007e699d624000)

libpng, libz, libkpathsea, libstdc++ are much more likely to break than glibc.

  $ ldd /usr/bin/lualatex
 linux-vdso.so.1 (0x00007ffe4f8d6000)
 libtexlua53.so.5 => /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libtexlua53.so.5 (0x00007eccb87c1000)
 libzzip-0.so.13 => /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libzzip-0.so.13 (0x00007eccb9392000)
 libpng16.so.16 => /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libpng16.so.16 (0x00007eccb8786000)
 libharfbuzz.so.0 => /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libharfbuzz.so.0 (0x00007eccb86b7000)
 libz.so.1 => /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libz.so.1 (0x00007eccb9376000)
 libkpathsea.so.6 => /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libkpathsea.so.6 (0x00007eccb8699000)
 libm.so.6 => /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libm.so.6 (0x00007eccb85b2000)
 libgcc_s.so.1 => /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libgcc_s.so.1 (0x00007eccb8592000)
 libc.so.6 => /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libc.so.6 (0x00007eccb8200000)
 libglib-2.0.so.0 => /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libglib-2.0.so.0 (0x00007eccb8458000)
 libfreetype.so.6 => /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libfreetype.so.6 (0x00007eccb8138000)
 libgraphite2.so.3 => /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libgraphite2.so.3 (0x00007eccb842f000)
 /lib64/ld-linux-x86-64.so.2 (0x00007eccb93c5000)
 libpcre.so.3 => /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libpcre.so.3 (0x00007eccb80c2000)
 libbrotlidec.so.1 => /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libbrotlidec.so.1 (0x00007eccb80b4000)
 libbrotlicommon.so.1 => /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libbrotlicommon.so.1 (0x00007eccb8091000)

no comment

PS: you could edit your previous comment and/or apologize for accusing me twice of forgery.

Yeah, this is also not a fair fight.

The "will it work in 10 years?" just swayed _immensely_ in Typst's favor.

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