> At least we have Docker now

I'm not so sure this is a desirable state to be in long-term.

While Docker (and other container solutions) does provide solutions to some of the challenges around environment consistency, build artefact management, development environments with linked services, etc., it's also one of numerous de-facto tools that in some ways ends up putting more effort on the end-user to adopt. Less effort than installing all dependencies yourself? Absolutely. More effort (and for no real reward) than a single binary built natively for the target platform? Yep.

This feels like a sort of 'shift right' approach to releasing an application in terms of developer effort. As a developer you can just bundle everything into a container image and now the end user needs Docker and the install is going to leave a mess of image layers on their system. You don't need all the dependencies installed system-wide, that's true, but why can't they just be bundled with the application?

It's also not a great cross-platform tool, as Docker on anything except Linux just hides the requisite virtualisation. It's mostly transparent, true, but is still plagued by platform-specific issues such as write performance on mounted volumes on macOS being ~10x as slow (there's a fairly old thread on the Docker forums that's still open with this as a reported issue, and it does't look like it's going away).

Additionally, while disk storage _is_ (comparably) cheap nowadays, the buildup of image layers that contain endless copies of binary dependencies doesn't feel great. I don't want or need hundreds of copies of libc et al. all with slightly different versions sitting around. Even the 'slim' Debian images are min. 120MB, let alone the 1GB full ones. As Python is on topic for this thread the Alpine images are smaller, but then Alpine image builds for Python don't work with the standard PyPI wheels (I'm not actually sure if this is still true, need to check).

As languages like Python are just source releases, some tooling is definitely needed to make that more palatable in terms of handling releases of Python tools (just big collections of scripts), but being able to build and copy a single binary for a Go application feels great having spent a lot of time practically requiring Docker for release Python tools.

And all of this is really just getting us back to where we were years ago, where it was actually feasible to release a native binary for a target platform. The difference is that Go's tooling around related areas such as dependency management and cross-platform compilation is more standardised, and as a result the developer experience for this is much nicer than with other comparable languages that also compile to native code.

Arguably a lot of the development decisions around how to manage and release tools comes down to how good the experience is for developers. Docker ends up being favourable for Python because there's no 'standard' Python way to bundle applications with their dependencies and Docker basically solves this problem, even if in a messy way.

Does Docker have its place? Definitely. Do I hope it sticks around in favour of improved cross-platform developer tooling? Absolutely not.