Has anybody been able to build a statically linked binary that shows a Vulkan surface? I’ve put some context around this problem in the video. I understand that the vulkan driver has to be loaded dynamically - so it’s more of a question whether a statically built app can reliably load and talk with it. I think it should be possible but haven’t actually seen anyone make it work. I’m aware of “static-window9” by Andrew Kelley but sadly it doesn’t work any more (at least on my Gentoo machine T_T).
(I’m also aware of AppImages but I don’t think they’re the “proper” solution to this problem - more like a temporary bandaid - better than Docker but still far from perfect)
The question should by why you’d want to. Careful if your reply is something about ‘one binary to work on a very diverse arrangement of library pinnings’ because the next question would be ‘why would you think that’s either achievable or valuable as a goal’; and toss in a ‘why try to ship the same binary in several different repos anyway’ bonus question.
In short, if your biggest problem is how to build a binary that works everywhere, you have a lot of questions about responsible build/release processes to answer, and they will be embarrassing for you.
I think of demoscene, game jams, desktop pets and other sorts of small home-brew software written by & for small groups of people. There is nothing embarrassing about one-off programs. I understand that what you said is just a figure of speech and you don’t really think so (and thank you for a well thought comment) but it still makes me kind of sad to see this kind of shaming. It’s discouraging people from being creative.
I’d say my bar is already low. A toy GUI program that draws a triangle and plays a sound should work on my friend’s machine (with a different set of system libraries) and it shouldn’t randomly break when OS update bumps some library version. AFAIK something like that would require a static binary (INTERP is a no-go) and an ability to dlopen stuff at runtime.
Writing software that “just works” shouldn’t be as hard as it is.
Sounds like flatpaks/appimages with extra steps
Includes all dependencies? ✔️
A single file? ✔️
Independent of host libraries? ✔️
Limited learning curve? ✔️
Not sure how appimages handle it internally, but with flatpaks you can even be storage efficient with layers, whereas 100s of static binaries could contain an awful lot of duplicates.