Personal website of Harmen Stoppels
Popular belief says the typical bottleneck of programs is I/O. That's one of the reasons slow programming languages like Python can exist, since their slowness is masked by it. But even when writing a simple word count program, it's not trivial to beat the sequential read speed of NVMe disks.
Typically you either have an executable or a shared library, but can you have an executable shared library too?
Nix, Guix, Gentoo Prefix and Spack install every package in their own immutable prefix. These prefix directories contain a unique hash derived from the versions and flavors of the package itself and its dependencies, which ensures that multiple variants of the same package can coexist. The non-standard directory structure makes life hard for the dynamic linker to locate libraries -- but what if we…