Hacker News Reader

Comment by bestouff | Hacker News Reader

My fav is this :

> Someone decided to trash the one part of Windows that was usable? The file system is no longer usable. The registry is not usable. This program listing was one sane place but now it is all crapped up.

This is so true, and not only under Windows. Install any modern program under any modern OS and have a look at the filesystem, it's a flaming mess. Nowadays the only solution "smart people" have found is to install a complete system, complete with libraries and frameworks, for each program.

I miss the days of simple executables.

View on HN

> I miss the days of simple executables.

One of my "santa's not real" moments of computing was realizing how much static and dynamic libraries fucking suck. This cannot be overstated, and is illustrated perfectly by the heroic efforts of software vendors to get away from them.

Okay, a few functions like fopen are fine - but even those are syscall wrappers IRL. But every OS seems to have concluded, that in the place of API calls, one should rather have streams of text (UNIX) or binary messages (Windows, also a bunch of Linux desktop stuff, like Wayland), or File I/O.

Basically a major motivation behind JIT langauges (C#/.NET certainly) was an effort to get away from dynamically linked libraries,

Even DOS didn't really have libraries, you had peripherals mapped to memory at certain addresses, and a set of interrupts, and that was it.

These single file Go and Rust programs read and write stdio and/or network, which is a reasonable solution to a lot of problems, but certainly not all of them, especially in the interactive space.

> Even DOS didn't really have libraries, you had peripherals mapped to memory at certain addresses,

And linked libraries are interfaces mapped into memory at certain names. I think that's an awesome improvement.

> Even DOS didn't really have libraries, you had peripherals mapped to memory at certain addresses, and a set of interrupts, and that was it.

Did I just dream up loading a mouse driver and MSCDEX in DOS?

That's why I like the "managed" model Debian uses. Programs are enforced to comply to the OS standards. If they don't, they either get changed by the Debian maintainers or just not included into the distribution. That's why I can know where things are in my filesystem.

I love Debian so much. The amount of work done by volunteers is staggering, and the result is impeccable.

Rust and Go can create a single statically linked executable and they are very popular. It could become a thing.

The difference in complexity between my go and my Python docker image is actually hilarious. 100s of files and package managers and npm and whatever else.. vs 1 file.

Where does NPM play in to the build?

Npm always finds its way in, usually for building web artifacts.

Beats me but somehow we do!

Every day I drop 1k lines of Python code and replace with go. Will be fully go soon!

I really enjoy single-executable Rust things - that's what I use for building web apps (SSR). But it's not that widespread (for now ?).

I don't think I'll ever learn what the folder structure on Linux actually means

man hier (https://man.archlinux.org/man/hier.7.en).

Reply on news.ycombinator.com