alt Hacker NewsI'm confused -- does this compile it live when the server ships code? How do we resolve dependencies, toolset etc.. Is the idea to just pick an old enough platform toolchain you expect to be present?
I'm confused -- does this compile it live when the server ships code? How do we resolve dependencies, toolset etc.. Is the idea to just pick an old enough platform toolchain you expect to be present?
In all cases, the code is pre-compiled. A user never waits for anything to compile. When Outer Loop installs Outer Shell, it downloads pre-compiled binaries to the server. For Linux these are compiled against a manylinux ABI. Ditto for when Outer Shell installs one of the bundled apps. When a backend serves a native "web" app over HTTP it sends already-compiled ARM (or x86) code to the client.
Dependencies are less of a concern for the frontend binaries. For backends, I use a dependency-light approach, static-linking anything that's needed. Of course, people are welcome to do backends however they want, and just tell Outer Shell about the systemd/launchd units via the API. I used this no-dependency approach to keep everything lightweight and to keep install steps trivial, but admittedly it pushes me in certain directions (for example, using custom binary formats rather than sqlite).