I just had a vision of all major OS projects providing developer containers for their projects. Like, you could just pull the latest Firefox dev container and run a single command to have a running debuggable app. I know one of the major pains we have when on-boarding new people is the whole dance to get to that first working build / first meaningful change. I can imagine this being significantly more simple if a wor…
You know, there once was a time when we did everything in folders and didn't need the overhead of containerization just to keep well behaved things from stepping all over each other and breaking everything. Like all progress in computing we've reinvented the wheel, but now with a few additional layers of abstraction and the consequential performance degradation.
Those were the days…when we didn't have stupid watchdogs like memory protection and preemptive scheduling, and we all shared resources nicely and fairly, all the time. There were never crashes because someone touched memory that they weren't supposed to, or hangs because someone decided they were more important than all the other processes. No siree.