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Comment on Lightweight Alpine VMs on macOSparent

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I like the concept of having a musl-based distro, but the utility of Alpine is frankly limited at the moment.

Sublime is just one case. We had a Python service running in an Alpine container because it was thought as "mean and lean" by someone. Sound choice, right?

Guess what: we used a handful of (popular) Python modules that are backed by native libraries and PyPi didn't have musl-linked versions for them. The "mean and lean" Alpine-based image ended up weighing more than a debian-slim-based image.

I had Alpine running on WSL as my main dev environment for a long time. I've heard the python issues before, but I can confirm node.js stuff all worked flawlessly.

IIRC npm will compile native extensions, sounds like PyPi (is that a package manager?) distributes binaries.

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