This is both brilliant and absolutely cursed: https://fzakaria.com/2026/08/23/your-executable-is-a-sqlite-database
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@dymaxion Extremely compelling. I literally laughed in a pleasurable way at some of the narrative twists. What breaks when you try to really use it, I wonder.
@timbray
I'm genuinely curious, yeah. I mean, there quite obviously would be like a decade of work, minimum, for a team to actually build out and provide strong guarantees for the security structures we have elsewhere, etc. On the other hand, it's a really compelling isolation primitive if you design it right — want another parallel userland? DB = VM.
(And yes, you'd need to build that part, but conceptually...)
@dymaxion Huh, I haven’t done serious deep-security work or issued an ld command for many years, but dynamic linking still makes my skin crawl.
Related, and granted that it’s at a different level: So many senior folk heaved a collective sigh of relief when Go & Rust took us back to static executables.
All we can say is that this feels like a promising direction.
@timbray @dymaxion I pounded my fist so many times about this. Like "why are we supporting Firefox dynamically linked on RedHat or whatever".
I did eventually get an answer, years into it. It's because the cost adds up if you're running a bunch of VMs or Docker containers. That way lets you cram more stuff on the same hardware.
In a previous life, I said "just put Ubuntu on it, it's all shared". So there is no point in making everything run on Alpine Linux. The cost is paid once.
