Squirrel
go
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Squirrel | go | |
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37 | 2,070 | |
7,155 | 119,564 | |
0.8% | 1.2% | |
6.0 | 10.0 | |
3 months ago | 5 days ago | |
C++ | Go | |
MIT License | BSD 3-clause "New" or "Revised" License |
Stars - the number of stars that a project has on GitHub. Growth - month over month growth in stars.
Activity is a relative number indicating how actively a project is being developed. Recent commits have higher weight than older ones.
For example, an activity of 9.0 indicates that a project is amongst the top 10% of the most actively developed projects that we are tracking.
Squirrel
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ClickOnce
I never had much luck with ClickOnce, so I was using Squirrel.Windows. I've recently switched to the Clowd.Squirrel fork, since I needed support for AzureSignTool in the build process.
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Any sufficiently advanced uninstaller is indistinguishable from malware
As soon as Office 2007 didn't use MSI the format was doomed.
I assume the Here in NIH refers to an individual team, not MS as a whole.
Teams is entirely NIH https://github.com/Squirrel/Squirrel.Windows for updates to the Electron app.
I would use winget, but MS made it weirdly hard to run as a script on multiple computers, it installs per user, because... who knows.
So still using chocolatey
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Thanks, log
Back in the day, wasn't Discord installed using Squirrel?
- C# Windows desktop app - Best way to create an installer and auto-updater?
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In the year 2023, what is the best way to deploy/distribute a WPF Application?
Originally, we used to use Squirrel.Windows for our internal applications but we had a few issues with it before we finally dropped it.
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WinForms Application Updater
The most viable option with the path of least resistance would be Squirrel.Windows as it is both and installer and updater but has some caveats (SemVer pattern must be followed).
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[ClickOnce] How to get rid of this message?
Maybe someone has a better ide, but this is one of many reasons why I'm trying to get all our old ClickOnce installers migrated to something else (I've heard good things about Squirrel.
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Compose Multiplatform 1.2 Is Out: New Mouse and Keyboard APIs, ProGuard Support, Online Updates
Electron does have auto-update built in (Squirrel), but it comes with severe non-price related caveats. Squirrel is only intermittently maintained and goes through long periods in which the different versions are abandoned (see for Windows, macOS). People have requested a switch to Sparkle on macOS, which is what Conveyor uses, but with no response. There's also the issue that their update solutions require interactive servers but the only free one is restricted to open source projects, and isn't itself open source. The Electron website points you towards a variety of projects if you want to run your own server but all of them are (again) abandoned for years.
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What is currently a good way to provide an installer for WPF application?
We replaced clickonce with https://github.com/Squirrel/Squirrel.Windows and are generally happy with the choice
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How to disable discord from trying to update after reboot?
Discord in the Task Manager can sometimes show up as "Update", made by GitHub, because Discord uses a program, that GitHub / their devs were/are involved with making, to update the app, and some kind of bug happens that means it doesn't display as 'Discord'.
go
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From Homemade HTTP Router to New ServeMux
net/http: add methods and path variables to ServeMux patterns Discussion about ServeMux enhancements
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Building a Playful File Locker with GoFr
Make sure you have Go installed https://go.dev/.
- Fastest way to get IPv4 address from string
- We now have crypto/rand back ends that ~never fail
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Why Go is great choice for Software engineering.
The Go Programming Language
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OpenBSD 7.5 Released
When Go first shipped, it was already well-documented that the only stable ABI on some platforms was via dynamic libraries (such as libc) provided by said platforms. Go knowingly and deliberately ignored this on the assumption that they can get away with it. And then this happened:
https://github.com/golang/go/issues/16606
If that's not "getting burned", I don't know what is. "Trying to provide a nice feature" is an excuse, and it can be argued that it is a valid one, but nevertheless they knew that they were using an unstable ABI that could be pulled out from under them at any moment, and decided that it's worth the risk. I don't see what that has to do with "not being as broadly compatible as they had hoped", since it was all known well in advance.
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Go's Error Handling Is Perfect
Sadly, I think that is indeed radically different from Go’s design. Go lacks anything like sum types, and proposals to add them to the language have revealed deep issues that have stalled any development. See https://github.com/golang/go/issues/57644
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Golang: out-of-box backpressure handling with gRPC, proven by a Grafana dashboard
I've been writing a lot about Go and gRPC lately:
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Go Enums Still Suck
I have a mountain of respect for Bell Labs and its contributions to the public welfare, and a lot of respect for the current group of alumni, mostly at Google, and mostly affiliated to a greater or lesser degree with golang. I have my differences with one or two of them (Pike telegraphs a wildly overcompensated imposter syndrome, but he’s almost as much of a genius as he acts like he is and who am I to judge on an overcompensated imposter syndrome, moreover when the guy in at the next desk over is Ken Thompson, who wouldn’t be a little intimidated by the legend).
With that said, golang is too opinionated for its level of adoption, too out-of-touch with emerging consensus (and I’m being generous with “emerging” here, the Either monad is more than an emerging consensus around the right default for error handling), and too insular a leadership to be, in my personal opinion, a key contender outside some narrow niches.
I’m aware that there are avid advocates for golang on HN, and that I’m liable to upset some of them by saying so, so I’m going to use some examples to illustrate my point and to illustrate that I’ve done my homework before being critical.
Many, including myself, became aware of what is now called golang via this presentation at Google in 2007 (https://youtu.be/hB05UFqOtFA) introducing Newsqueak, a language Pike was pushing back in the mid-90s with what seems to be limited enthusiasm no greater than the enthusiasm for its predecessor Squeak. Any golang hacker will immediately recognize the language taking shape on the slides.
I’ve been dabbling with golang for something like a decade now, because I really want to like it. But like a lot of the late labs stuff it seems to have suffered from the dangerous combination of the implications of Richard Gabriel’s Worse is Better observation: it was simpler, faster, cheaper, and ultimately more successful to incrementally adapt innovations from Plan9 into Linux (and other Unices), to adapt innovations from sam and acme into nvim/emacs (and now VSCode), and to adapt channel-based and other principled concurrency from Newsqueak/golang (not to mention Erlang and other more full-throated endorsements of that region of the design space) into now countless other languages ranging from things like TypeScript and Rust at the high end of adoption all the way to things like Haskell at more moderate levels of adoption. Ironically enough, the success of UTF-8 (a compromise for the non-ASCII world but the compromise that made it happen at all) is this same principle in action via the same folks!
And golang would be fine as yet another interesting language serving as a testbed for more pragmatic applications of radical ideas: but it’s got corporate sponsorship that puts Sun Microsystems and Java to shame in scale and scope, but done quietly enough to not set off the same alarm bells.
The best example of this is probably this GitHub issue: https://github.com/golang/go/issues/19991 (though there are countless like it). I’ve worked with Tony Arcieri, he’s brilliant and humble and hard-working and while we haven’t kept in touch, I keep an eye out, and he’s clearly passionate about the success of golang. But proposal after proposal for some variation of the Either monad has died on procedural grounds for nearly a decade, all while being about the only thing that everyone else agrees on in modern industrial PLT: TypeScript supports it, Rust supports it, C++ de-facto supports it via things like abseil and folly, and of course the hard-core functional community never even bothered with something worse in the modern era. You can even kind of do it, but there are intentional limitations in the way generics get handled across compilation units to ensure it never gets adopted as a community-driven initiative. Try if you don’t believe me (my golang code has a Result type via emacs lisp I wrote).
Another example is the really weird compilation chain: countless serious people have weighed in here, I’ll elide all the classics because most people making these arguments have their own favorite language and they’ve all been on HN dozens of times, but a custom assembly language is a weird thing to have done, almost no one outside the hardcore golang community thinks it’s sane, the problems is creates for build systems and FFI and just everything about actually running the stuff are completely unnecessary: there are other IRs, not all of them are LLVM IR if you’ve got some beef with LLVM IR, and given that go doesn’t seriously target FFI as more than a weird black sheep (cgo) there’s, ya know, assembly language. It’s a parting shot from the Plan9 diehards with the industrial clout to make it stick.
The garbage collection story is getting better but it’s an acknowledged handicap in a MxN threading model context, it’s not a secret or controversial even among the maintainers. See the famous “Two Knobs” talk.
Raw pointers, sum types, dependency management, build, generics that never get there, FFI: solved problem after solved problem killed by pocket veto, explained away, minimized, all with mega-bucks, quiet as a gopher corporate sponsorship fighting a Cold War against Sun and the JVM that doesn’t exist anymore marketed by appealing to the worst instincts of otherwise unimpeachable luminaries of computing.
There is great software written in golang by engineers I aspire to as role models (TailScale and Brad respectively as maybe the best example). I had to get serious about learning golang and how to work around its ideologically-motivated own-goals because I got serious about WebRTC and Pion (another great piece of software). But it sucks. I dread working on that part of the stack.
Go enums do suck, but that’s because we pay a very heavy price for golang being mainstream at all: we’ve thrown away ZooKeeper and engineer-millennia of garbage-collector work and countless other treasures, it sucks oxygen out of the room on more plausible C successors like D and Jai and Nim and Zig and V and (it pains me to admit but it’s true) Rust.
Yes there is great software in golang, tons of it. Yes there are iconic legends who are passionate about it, yes it brought new stuff to the party and the mainstream.
But the cost was too high.
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GoFetch: New side-channel attack using data memory-dependent prefetchers
It seems to be userspace accessible: https://github.com/golang/go/issues/66450
What are some alternatives?
AutoUpdater.NET - AutoUpdater.NET is a class library that allows .NET developers to easily add auto update functionality to their classic desktop application projects.
v - Simple, fast, safe, compiled language for developing maintainable software. Compiles itself in <1s with zero library dependencies. Supports automatic C => V translation. https://vlang.io
Wix Toolset
TinyGo - Go compiler for small places. Microcontrollers, WebAssembly (WASM/WASI), and command-line tools. Based on LLVM.
Chocolatey - Chocolatey - the package manager for Windows
zig - General-purpose programming language and toolchain for maintaining robust, optimal, and reusable software.
Clowd.Squirrel - Quick and easy installer and automatic updates for cross-platform dotnet applications
Nim - Nim is a statically typed compiled systems programming language. It combines successful concepts from mature languages like Python, Ada and Modula. Its design focuses on efficiency, expressiveness, and elegance (in that order of priority).
NetSparkle - NetSparkle is a C# cross-platform software update framework for .NET developers compatible with .NET 4.6.2/.NET 6+, WinForms, WPF, and Avalonia; uses Ed25519 or DSA signatures! View basic usage here in the README or visit our website for code docs.
Angular - Deliver web apps with confidence 🚀
wixsharp - Framework for building a complete MSI or WiX source code by using script files written with C# syntax.
golang-developer-roadmap - Roadmap to becoming a Go developer in 2020