The biggest impact suckless had on me was via. Their Stali Linux FAQ: https://sta.li/faq/ .
They've built an entirely statically linked user space for Linux . Until then i never questioned the default Linux "shared libraries for everything" approach and assumed that was the best way to deliver software.
Every little cli tool i wrote at work - i used to create distro packages for them or a tarball with a shell script that set LD_LIBRARY_PATH to find the correct version of the xml libraries etc i used.
It didn't have to be this way. Dealing with distro versioning headaches or the finnicky custom packaging of the libraries into that tar ball just to let the users run by 150 kb binary.
Since then I've mostly used static linking where i can. AppImages otherwise. I'm not developing core distro libraries. I'm just developing a tiny "app" my users need to use. I'm glad with newer languages like Go etc... static linking is the default.
Don't get me wrong. Dynamic linking definitely has it's place. But by default our software deployment doesn't need to be this complicated.
It's been around ten years that my desktop barely changed except a few pixels thanks to dwm and dmenu. I am a bit exaggerating but I love the stability that minimalism brings. If only they could make a pdf viewer...
Suckless has a beautiful coding philosophy and I wish all software was written with this in mind, but surely a window manager and X-menu aren't really the best showcases? These aren't the types of programs where complexity is the biggest enemy.
I'm not claiming I could write these tools as simple as these, but surely the importance of these paradigms arise when actual complicated software is needed?
saidinesh5 ·1 days ago
They've built an entirely statically linked user space for Linux . Until then i never questioned the default Linux "shared libraries for everything" approach and assumed that was the best way to deliver software.
Every little cli tool i wrote at work - i used to create distro packages for them or a tarball with a shell script that set LD_LIBRARY_PATH to find the correct version of the xml libraries etc i used.
It didn't have to be this way. Dealing with distro versioning headaches or the finnicky custom packaging of the libraries into that tar ball just to let the users run by 150 kb binary.
Since then I've mostly used static linking where i can. AppImages otherwise. I'm not developing core distro libraries. I'm just developing a tiny "app" my users need to use. I'm glad with newer languages like Go etc... static linking is the default.
Don't get me wrong. Dynamic linking definitely has it's place. But by default our software deployment doesn't need to be this complicated.
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unclad5968 ·1 days ago
> Variadic macros are acceptable, but remember
Maybe my brain is too smooth, but I don't understand how for(int i = 0...) is too clever but variadic macros are not. That makes no sense to me.
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lugu ·1 days ago
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sitkack ·1 days ago
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tomtomtom777 ·22 hours ago
I'm not claiming I could write these tools as simple as these, but surely the importance of these paradigms arise when actual complicated software is needed?