Possible Distributions quote of the year

Posted Jan 23, 2025 20:10 UTC (Thu) by mb (subscriber, #50428)
In reply to: Possible Distributions quote of the year by bluca
Parent article: Distributions quote of the week

> Because that's what a mature, stable ecosystem like a Linux distro needs.

Ok.
Why do distros need that?

>Because you don't have a ~100 MB blob of C macros that implements

One byte is enough to break the expected ABI of the applications.

> Because the Rust stdlib changes its hash from 123456789 to abcdefghi
> and the dynamic loader fails to find the dso that the program was linked to.

The stdlib is linked statically.
So, why does it stop working after one day?
Was I right that this was all FUD?

>Meanwhile, glibc has been libc.so.6 since what now, 20 years?

You can implement a shared library in Rust that just exposes C ABI and do exactly the same thing.
Where is the problem?

Possible Distributions quote of the year

Posted Jan 24, 2025 12:17 UTC (Fri) by bluca (subscriber, #118303) [Link]

> Why do distros need that?

https://lwn.net/Articles/1005986/

> One byte is enough to break the expected ABI of the applications.

What? No?

> The stdlib is linked statically.

Did you miss that this is about dynamic linking? It's literally in the first post, that you are replying to: https://lwn.net/Articles/1005961/

> You can implement a shared library in Rust that just exposes C ABI and do exactly the same thing.

So the answer is, each distro has to reimplement their own standard library from scratch? I mean, it's _an_ answer for sure, but it's also a sad joke, which perfectly describes the current state of the whole ecosystem, and why it's completely unsustainable