The Rise of the Stupid Network: a remarkable 1997 essay on what ISPs as dumb bit pipes enables, moving innovation to client devices on the internet, and avoiding the scarcity mindset from when hardware was expensive:
https://www.hyperorg.com/misc/stupidnet.html
miniblog.
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I would have thought that invoking a C compiler would be a solved problem. Looking at Rust's cc crate there's a remarkable long tail of corner cases to fix.
Exotic CPUs, microarchitectures, compiler differences, operating system differences, etc.
One remarkable aspect of the JS packaging ecosystem is that people package individual functions. For example, lodash.sortby: https://www.npmjs.com/package/lodash.sortby
It shows how lightweight the packaging process is. I've not seen this happen in other ecosystems.
Smalltalk has a remarkable method named #become: that allows you to modify all pointers to a given object to point to a different object!
https://gbracha.blogspot.com/2009/07/miracle-of-become.html
This goes even further than updating instances when a class changes, it's changing instance references.