I thought I’ll make this thread for all of you out there who have questions but are afraid to ask them. This is your chance!

I’ll try my best to answer any questions here, but I hope others in the community will contribute too!

  • AMDIsOurLord
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    8
    arrow-down
    1
    ·
    edit-2
    8 months ago

    That’s the same on ANY platform, but windows is far worse because most apps ship a DLL and -never- update the damn thing. With Linux, it’s a little bit more transparent. (edit: unless you do the stupid shit and link statically, but again in the brave new world of Rust and Go having 500 Mb binaries for a 5 Kb program is acceptable)

    Also, applications use the API/ABI of a particular library. Now, if the developers of the said library actually change something in the library’s behavior with an update, your app won’t work it no more unless you go and actually update your own code and find everything that’s broken.

    So as you can understand, this is a maintenance burden. A lot of apps delegate this to a later time, or something that happens sometimes with FOSS is that the app goes unmaintained somewhat, or in some cases the app customizes the library so much, that you just can’t update that shit anymore. So you fix on a particular version of the library.