“Static Linking Considered Harmful” Considered Harmful

• go

  2,067 119,564 10.0 Go

  The Go programming language

  

> I think Go tried to go fully static but ran into problems [...] So you can probably go fully static if you are only targeting Linux.

There's yet another problem Go ran into on Linux: resolving hostnames. The official way to resolve hostnames in a glibc-based system is to read /etc/nsswitch.conf, dynamically load the libraries referenced there, and call each of them in the correct order. Go tried to emulate that mechanism, going through glibc only when it saw a NSS module it didn't know, but that caused issues on musl-based systems which used a different mechanism (https://github.com/golang/go/issues/35305). And it cannot ever be fully static on glibc-based systems, since there's always the chance of someone adding a new module to /etc/nsswitch.conf (for instance, some Linux distributions have now added the newer "resolve" module to that line, so Go would have to implement yet another one to keep being fully static).

The Rust approach of dynamically linking to the shared C libraries (statically linking only the Rust libraries) avoided all these issues.

• Ceedling

  3 557 3.3 Ruby

  Ruby-based unit testing and build system for C projects

  

This is very situational, but I have recently been part of a project that does a lot of C server-side development and we have found that static linking our non-glibc dependencies has really improved our developer experience. Using ceedling's dependency plugin[1] and producing a single "statically" linked library has made our C development much closer to using a language with a more modern package manager. Don't get me wrong, if I was trying to distribute binaries to machines I didn't control I'd definitely be willing to invest in the Linux packaging "fun", but for a server-side application it's been a good choice for our team overall.

[1] https://github.com/ThrowTheSwitch/Ceedling/tree/master/plugi...

• WorkOS

  workos.com sponsored

  The modern identity platform for B2B SaaS. The APIs are flexible and easy-to-use, supporting authentication, user identity, and complex enterprise features like SSO and SCIM provisioning.

  

• oasis

  26 2,701 8.8 Roff

  a small statically-linked linux system

  

I think there are only experiments. From what I know Oasis Linux is furthest along https://github.com/oasislinux/oasis

Another resources is https://sta.li/

• Sourcetrail

  46 12,302 7.0 C++

  Discontinued Sourcetrail - free and open-source interactive source explorer

  

You know, the "all functions have unique distinct names" idea is pretty interesting!

Honestly, that reminds me of the PHP standard library a bit, which feels oriented towards procedural programming at times. Now, the language and the actual implementation of the functions aside, i found that pattern really pleasant to work with, especially since it let me work more in line with functional programming principles as well - pure functions and no global state (even if passing data around was more difficult).

Now, i won't say that the approach fits every project or domain out there, but at the very least having a clear idea of what your code depends on and what's going on inside of your code base is an idea that i still stand by. Sadly, the only tool that i found that at least tries to make this easier was Sourcetrail, which is essentially dead now: https://www.sourcetrail.com/

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