[lqstuart]

This is definitely true. You see it constantly in deep learning applications, where eg NVIDIA’s fancy fp8 stuff needs C++11 ABI, so they need to compile torch from source, which means everything with C++ dependencies on torch needs to be recompiled, and eventually it’s much easier to ship a container image. It can be done with an Ansible playbook, sure, if you don’t have to ever do anything else with your machine.

[palmfacehn]

Isn't it also true that not every library needs to be deployed system-wide?

I find that many of these poorly maintained build systems have very little to do with native code. Often it is a node.js server + frontend or in the case of AI, python. Some of this seems related to the current norms in those ecosystems.

[kaptainscarlet]

One of the best things about docker that is not mentioned often enough is how it keeps your host machine clean.