Ask HN: Why don't we have a shared "libchrome" the way we have glibc or DirectX?
3•omagdy7•4mo ago
The status quo of shipping a cross platform desktop app easily for the past years have been electron, but this comes at the cost of pretty much shipping a chromium with each app which is not ideal. So why don't we have a libchrome like we have glibc in Linux or DirectX in windows. Imagine every game would bundle their own DirectX version with them. The big blocker I imagineis stability glibc doesn't change much but chrome is constantly changing, but I feel this is easily fixable by maintaining a LTS version of the library and calling it a day. Has anyone pitched this idea before. Is chromium as an engine too coupled in logic with chrome as a desktop app making it impossible to ship it as a library?
Comments
akerl_•4mo ago
> I feel this is easily fixable by maintaining a LTS version of the library and calling it a day.
I think you're really underselling the amount of work involved there. What makes you think that's ~"easy".
omagdy7•4mo ago
Well yeah I guess "easy" wasn't the most appropriate word here I just wanted to communicate that API stability shouldn't be like a big wall if we wanted to bundle chrome as a library. but yeah maintaining any thing of the size of chrome would never be easy
akerl_•4mo ago
There's not really a great framework for GUI apps on Mac/Windows to generically interact with a shared library. DirectX and friends are sort of an anomaly here.
So you'd need somebody to build the tooling for that kind of resource-sharing and convince people to use it (think about similar prior waves where various toolchains became common practice for things like update-checking, installers, etc). And they'd basically have to be doing it out of love-of-the-game, because there's not really any money in it and any time it breaks people would be pissed.
wmf•4mo ago
Windows has WebView2, macOS has WebKit, Linux has various libraries. Tauri uses these for example. There's also Chromium Embedded Framework which is cross platform but it's not included with the OS.
Every game does install its own version of DirectX BTW and WinSXS exists to keep all the versions straight.
akerl_•4mo ago
I think you're really underselling the amount of work involved there. What makes you think that's ~"easy".
omagdy7•4mo ago
akerl_•4mo ago
So you'd need somebody to build the tooling for that kind of resource-sharing and convince people to use it (think about similar prior waves where various toolchains became common practice for things like update-checking, installers, etc). And they'd basically have to be doing it out of love-of-the-game, because there's not really any money in it and any time it breaks people would be pissed.