"For those that don't know: Alpine Linux is a security-oriented, lightweight Linux distribution based on musl libc and busy box. The latest version of Alpine Linux v3.3 weighs in at a whopping 5MB. Not bad for a full blown Linux OS considering 5MB is same size as the Windows Start button."

That last sentence made me laugh so badly :D

Speaking of fragile environments, what the hell is going on with the absolute dependency on python...?

I mean, I'm as reluctant to upgrade my system's python version as libc's.

How to break at least half of your system:

1. python3 --version
Python 3.8.10

2. rm -f /usr/bin/python3

3. ln -s /usr/bin/python3.13 /usr/bin/python3

And good luck opening most of the UI utilities and some of the terminal-based ones.

wtf... While everyone's barking at systemd, python quietly crawls in and claims the system's flexibility for itself w/o any resistance.

I imagine that's one of the aspects making NixOS a resilient solution...

Have you ever installed libc++?

If you haven't then i warn you.
When libc++ installs it does a lot of tests and it takes fucking forever!
What the fuck!
What are you even testing? How long patience people have?

And sorry for not screenshoting. I dont want to accidently interupt their "testing"

I appreciate Ruby so much more now after writing a tiny Assembly + C Grub-compatible kernel and being forced to read libc source code.
The lower levels truly are a dark place.

Writing simple terminal input/output lang (Hello, what's your name, hi) in D.
Compiling in D using standard lib: 6.1M
Compiling in D with inline assembly, no standard lib or libc, using syscalls: 1048 bytes!
I'm still freaking out a little.

See comments

Have you ever tried using sqlite3 from npm inside a docker container?
Yeah, it doesn't build on Alpine, despite being among the most popular Linux distros thanks to Docker.

Someone, somewhere, in the standard C library headers for my particular libc implementation, is #undef'ing assert() unconditionally and it's causing massive headaches.

Fuck the C preprocessor. There's no way I can track this down it seems, but my assert implementation is being quietly ignored and I have no recourse for it.

Gotta change all of my asserts to a different name now. Fun.

*long sigh*