Ask HN: Why don't we have a shared "libchrome" the way we have glibc or DirectX?
3 omagdy7 3 9/16/2025, 11:48:41 PM
The status quo of shipping a cross platform desktop app easily for the past years have been electron, but this comes at the cost of pretty much shipping a chromium with each app which is not ideal. So why don't we have a libchrome like we have glibc in Linux or DirectX in windows. Imagine every game would bundle their own DirectX version with them. The big blocker I imagineis stability glibc doesn't change much but chrome is constantly changing, but I feel this is easily fixable by maintaining a LTS version of the library and calling it a day. Has anyone pitched this idea before. Is chromium as an engine too coupled in logic with chrome as a desktop app making it impossible to ship it as a library?
I think you're really underselling the amount of work involved there. What makes you think that's ~"easy".
So you'd need somebody to build the tooling for that kind of resource-sharing and convince people to use it (think about similar prior waves where various toolchains became common practice for things like update-checking, installers, etc). And they'd basically have to be doing it out of love-of-the-game, because there's not really any money in it and any time it breaks people would be pissed.