[XorNot]

This is one of those things it feels like all the content addressable initiatives should be able to solve somehow. With near ubiquitous internet access, why can't a program ship with a list of standard library hashes it'll link against and my distro go fetch them from IPFS or whatever if they're not local.

[patrec]

Nix basically already does this, apart from the decentralised distributed cache (there is a centralised one and you can easily set up your own, too). All references, including to dynamically linked libraries are via unique, content addressable hash -- where "content" currently still happens to be content of the build recipe and all dependencies and sources, recursively, not the built artefact. There is work on referencing artefacts by the binary output hash though, because that obviously has better security properties when you want to have a non-centralized cache; the main problem is that a lot of software still has no reproducible build.

[pantalaimon]

The solution for this is now Docker, Flatpack, Snap, …

Just ship the whole environment and only rely on the stable kernel API.

[surajrmal]

This is very wasteful. On servers in the cloud that may be a reasonable approach, but there are still devices that are memory, storage, and/or network constrained enough where it's not. It's still necessary to have relatively stable interfaces such that most things can share the same version of a dependency and their still exists the ability to deduplicate the dependencies between different programs. I do agree that the current OS approaches to handle this are not great and there is room for new models, but docker containers are not a holistic solution.

[formerly_proven]

The Windows Component Store (aka Side-by-Side aka WinSxS) is sort of a content-addressed store for DLLs and the like, except the content-addressing isn't facilitated by a literal cryptographic hash over the contents, but instead by the logical identity of the component (name+version but more). And, it doesn't fetch anything automatically. Writes to certain paths are just intercepted and redirected into it, while storing an association somewhere else that the app that did that (or was installed doing that) wants that particular component (or at least, that's how I think that works).

[rkeene2]

This is what AppFS does, as well as CernVM-FS, though AppFS has more features