D for microservices

[Jonathan M Davis]

On Monday, October 23, 2017 12:13:12 Laeeth Isharc via Digitalmars-d wrote:
> How can we generate a static binary ?  I asked about this before,
> and the response was that it's a bad idea because of security
> vulns and so on.  True if you are running on a conventional Linux
> host.  But on the other hand, it's not that great if when the
> system phobos is upgraded all the D binaries break.  You can
> write a script using rdmd or dub scripting feature, but that
> doesn't work for more complex programs.

I believe that it works just fine if you do the linking step yourself, but
dmd doesn't properly handle it with -L-static:

https://issues.dlang.org/show_bug.cgi?id=6952

I have no idea how easy it would be to the linking manually with dub.

Alternatively, I believe that you can statically link against any 3rd party
libraries that you're using by linking to the .a file rather than by the
library name. That won't work for glibc, but much as I'd love to statically
link that, it's my understanding that doing so is generally a bad idea. I
don't recall the reasons though - and with the increased stability in
linux's ABI, I would have thought that it would be far less of an issue than
it would have been in the past. Certainly, the concept of being able to
statically link a program and then just run it on most any recent linux
distro without recompiling it sounds very appealing. Yes, you'll have to
recompile it for any security updates to any of your dependencies, whereas
that can be avoided with dynamic linking, but depending on what you're
doing, that often isn't really an issue, and it can be managed if it is
(heck, you're doing basically the same thing when maintaining something like
a docker image).

- Jonathan M Davis