> Also Apple does not embed icons in their binaries. Their app bundles are not binaries, they are a directory structure. The icon is just another file, just like the _actual_ executable(s).
Pedantry. You could mount an ELF as a filesystem if you had any desire to. Structures are just structures.
> This sort of ignores the hardest part of shipping binaries; linked libraries.
Time has shown that dynamic linking all the things is a terrible idea on many fronts anyway. Why do you think there's all this Docker around and compiling statically is on an upward trend?
The solution is simple: DLLs for base platform stuff that provides interfaces to the OS and common stuff, statically compile everything else. Then the OS just ships a "virtual arch" version of the platform DLLs in addition to native on every arch.
The reason the Linux Community don't want this sort of thing is that, frankly, they just hate stability. I mean, the Kernel is stable (driver ABI excepted), but basically nothing outside of that is.
> The reason the Linux Community don't want this sort of thing is that, frankly, they just hate stability.
I'd argue that the reason the Linux Community doesn't want this is that it introduces maintenance burdens on the community that only really serves to support corporations shipping proprietary software.
I really don't care about making proprietary software easier on linux, but I do care about linux having to carry the baggage of backwards compatability like Windows has had to handle just so that Google can deliver Chrome as a binary more reliably.
> reason the Linux Community don't want this sort of thing is that, frankly, they just hate stability
And yet I fearlessly upgrade my Linux system at any time. With OSX you first have to check if the software you use is at all compatible, especially if you use proprietary software..
> And yet I fearlessly upgrade my Linux system at any time
Only because you've never encountered an issue due to an upgrade, probably because your usecases are so mainstream and minimal that you've never had to use applications that aren't in the repo and well tested before release. If you look around and aren't wearing blinders you'll notice that a lot of people do have problems from upgrading.
Pedantry. You could mount an ELF as a filesystem if you had any desire to. Structures are just structures.
> This sort of ignores the hardest part of shipping binaries; linked libraries.
Time has shown that dynamic linking all the things is a terrible idea on many fronts anyway. Why do you think there's all this Docker around and compiling statically is on an upward trend?
The solution is simple: DLLs for base platform stuff that provides interfaces to the OS and common stuff, statically compile everything else. Then the OS just ships a "virtual arch" version of the platform DLLs in addition to native on every arch.
The reason the Linux Community don't want this sort of thing is that, frankly, they just hate stability. I mean, the Kernel is stable (driver ABI excepted), but basically nothing outside of that is.