Distributing any cross-platform software is a big pain. The moment you push your binary to the repo, it makes the repo heavyweight to pull later on. DotSlash helps to distribute architecture-specific executables, so the user downloads platform-specific binaries from a remote location, making `git clone` much less expensive. and writing a DotSlash file is much easier than writing a Bash script because it's just a simple key-value pair. take a look.
Today at Meta we open sourced DotSlash, which is something I came up with in early 2019 because I wanted a better way to distribute cross-platform command line tools with minimal overhead. As of 2024, DotSlash is executed *hundreds of millions of times per day* at Meta, so I was extremely excited to polish it up and share it externally! As someone who picked up "systems programming" what felt like late in my career, one thing I constantly remind myself is that DotSlash is not something I personally could have written 10 years ago. When I was starting out, Java and JavaScript were my go-to languages, but DotSlash only "works" because it is written in a *systems* programming language (Rust). It's exciting to have a broader set of things you can build as you add more tools to your toolbox! https://lnkd.in/eDyYzjyB