Glyph@miss_rodent Multiple distros means multiple platforms. Multiple platforms means multiple dev targets. Multiple dev targets means that developing for "Linux" is, at minimum, *many dozens of times more expensive* than developing for macOS, or Windows, or the web.
Cassandrich@glyph @miss_rodent Multiple platforms are only multiple dev targets if you're in a 1980s-mindset of #ifdef hell everywhere. If instead you write portable code to the specs not to "works on my machine", and probe for things rather than enumerating a million build combinatorics, supporting a multitude of different systems is not any harder than supporting one.
@dalias @miss_rodent spoken like a Java marketing executive from 2002. it will definitely be cool if this ever happens but after 30 years of waiting for it to materialize, I think we can call the experiment a failure
@glyph @miss_rodent It does work. This is why basically everything that was originally written for GNU/Linux compiles out of the box without problem on Alpine with musl. It was sometimes hard work fixing old bad practices people were stuck on, but now everyone benefits. And it HURTS when somebody wants to tear that up.
LisPi@dalias @glyph @miss_rodent Common Lisp also has a similar approach, the *features* variable's content is to be considered dynamically regardless of whether a given implementation hard compiles some of them.
Cross-implementation portability across architectures tends to work pretty well.